


we are not alive, we are home

by dinosaur



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bechdel Test Pass, Bisexuality, Character Study, Child Soldiers, Consent Issues, Dai-nana-han | Team 7 (Naruto)-centric, Domestic, Established Relationship, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Genderfluid Uzumaki Naruto, Harm to Animals, Hatake Kakashi is a Good Teacher, Healer Uzumaki Naruto, Konoha 12 - Freeform, Light BDSM, Mental Link, Multi, Other, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, References to Possible CSA, Strong Haruno Sakura, Team as Family, Trans Character, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2020-10-27 12:41:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20760530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaur/pseuds/dinosaur
Summary: The truth is something Sakura wraps around her own throat and uses to choke the fury in her heart to silence. The truth is, Sakura looks at Sasuke’s scarred, blackened neck that Naruto’s worn, gentle hands cannot help cupping, and knows she’s not alone.The truth is, the fury in her heart dances threats and bares its teeth and -One day someone will try and take them from her and Sakura is ready. She dares them.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> canon AU: less plot drama, same variable shades of emotional trauma.  
naruto is genderfluid with they/them pronouns & a couple other trans characters/subtle universe changes, pls ask if confused or curious!
> 
> title from aurora's home and playlist for this fic [[here] (listen in order! ;))](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DtLe8o6vOG3r58fBr3GRU?si=3f7SVxHXQ22gCqbz3b-Dfw)

> We are not alive  
We are surviving every time  
We are not alive  
Only dreams inside our minds
> 
> [Chorus]  
We are home
> 
> _"Home" by AURORA_

They shouldn’t be, maybe.

Not that they shouldn’t exist, but that they shouldn’t be them _like_ _this_. Like war just a word turned stale under child tongues, like punches for kisses and bindings for hugs, like inevitability.

They shouldn’t have been allowed to mutate into what they are.

Sakura holds the fury (for this, for all of it) somewhere behind her breastbone and pushes on it like a bruise.

“You don’t have to be so mad,” Kakashi says, misreading the direction of it, misunderstanding the scope.

_You taught us how to kill someone while choking on your own fear,_ she thinks. _We weren’t even 12,_ she thinks.

“Yes, I do,” she says.

No one reads it right, though. People around her aren’t mad – they’re sad. Sasuke is trauma, blood dripping continuously down the sides of his brain, consuming aching, screeching grief. Naruto is bone to chakra chill, slipsliding sideways unexpectedly, forever into sheer, empty, loneliness. Kakashi is blame, guilt, weights of dead bodies swinging wildly around his fragile wrists.

Fury isn’t in them, even if they occasionally wear its mask.

Fury is her. This is her balance.

They shouldn’t be, but they are, and she sets her fist to the edges each morning just to test the cracks of the foundation. How far, how far can she push?

Where does the fury end? Where does she?

How do they exist?

She’s furious and she’s not sure she’s ever gonna find out.


	2. Chapter 2

Sasuke wakes first, always. (Like a songbird, like a younger child.)

He’s never been a civilian, never gone hungry in an alleyway, never not had nightmares, never not been a morning person. Sakura thinks it’s comforting, to him, to be still and consistent in this with them. Maybe, somedays, to still hope the waking world holds good things.

“Morn’,” Sakura says into a yawn.

“Hey,” Sasuke murmurs into her hair, before sliding out of bed with barely a whisper.

Naruto frowns from the other side of the bed, hand reaching out to the open spot.

Sakura smiles, fills the space left behind. The sigh Naruto makes against her neck is warm, comforted. She fades back into sleep. They drift light on dreams, easy under their own roof, safe beyond three layered wards and barrier seals drawn in their mixed blood.

The sun is bright when Sakura wakes later, hand smoothing nonsense shapes into Naruto’s side. She exhales for a long moment, checking over herself. Naruto’s chakra is twined gracefully with hers, is what eased her so gently back into sleep. 

“Y’okay?” Sasuke asks from across the room. Glasses on, reports open, Sakura knows without turning.

“Yeah.”

(This is easy now.)

Gone are the days of waking up not knowing who she was or who they were. Gone are the days she didn’t have the fists or the kunai to fight her own mind. Gone are the days of Naruto’s latent dreamwalking after bloody missions, the desperate keep-safe Kyuubi chakra tendrils gripped with longing and spun into Sakura and Sasuke, pulling their minds scorching close. _Didn’t mean to, didn’t mean to, sorry, fuck, fuck,sorry _– Naruto was rarely distraught.

The two of them had been comforted, nonchalant. Upset only for Naruto’s upset.

What was dreamwalking in comparison to Sakura’s hand half way into Sasuke’s intestine tract, digging for poison senbon on the side of an S-class assignment gone to shit. To Sasuke’s tongue inside Naruto’s body, sweat and pleading and hours of slow slick kisses, a long awaited night gone just _just_ right. To Naruto’s wistful hopeful humming coming out of Sakura’s vocal cords, one day too long, with too many combination jutsu.

What was sharing one more thing, when they didn’t want any distance between them anyways?

“I always wanted to belong,” She says out loud, often and knows they will always echo her.

(This is easy now.

But it wasn’t for a long time. They shouldn’t have been made into weapons before they grew into people. They shouldn’t have found each other at the end of all things. She _rages_.)

This morning, they are safe.

She exhales, pulsing her chakra along Naruto’s like a caress, shares the sensation in an arc towards Sasuke. He exhales back, and his tempered chakra wisps along the bubble of the bed.

The sun is no longer streaming into the room by the time Naruto wakes, stretching between them. Sakura is reading poetry about oceans, propped on the pillows, one hand tangled in a playful chakra strings-jutsu with Sasuke still at the beaten desk in the corner. She’s about four minutes from winning, and they both know it. Sasuke is smiling, looking down at his paperwork.

“Cute,” Naruto cocks their head at the two of them and then slips off the bed to fall into lotus for morning meditation. Their chakra pulls back from Sakura’s and then smooths out into the air of the room like a thick humid wave.

“Thank you,” Sakura says primly, while her muscles go lax with warmth.

Sasuke’s eyes are closed, basking in Naruto. He lets her win within 30 seconds.

Naruto smiles like the sun, then slips utterly still.

“I’m drinking that coffee you brought back from Suna,” She tells them, easing out of bed and into the kitchen. A quiet thrill she stumbles on so often, maybe forgetting for the joy of remembering - she doesn’t need to ask them.

What’s theirs is hers is theirs.

She stands in their kitchen with katon marks across random surfaces and Naruto’s seal work spilling from the scrolls on the table to the table top itself. On the walls are Sakura and Sasuke’s probably-too-large chakra blade collection. Cookbooks have their own line on the counter and flak jackets blanket their chairs, plants perch on their windowsill that Naruto’s had since the orphanage and housewarming dishes from their adoptive parents cozy in the cabinets with hand drawn anti-break seals because Iruka and Kakashi and Tsunade and everyone knows them good, but hopefully doesn’t know how many broken dishes their tendency to have sex in the kitchen resulted in before these and this is their _home_.

Sakura breathes it in.

Mornings, she finds something other than rage.

\--

Mission time, though, the rage returns.

Tuesday, she kills four people who haven’t done anything worth getting killed over except wearing hitai-ate and moving wrong towards her team. She kills them with her gloved hands, just being faster, thinking strategically. Just being better. In the back of her mind, Sasuke’s disgust over death and Naruto’s mourning over loss of life are nearly louder than her own rage at the entire circumstance.

Her temporary team, two chuunin and a tokubetsu jonin, look to her for protection.

She kills four people because that’s how she knows how to give it.

Thursday, she sharpens blades, pet-sits Kakashi’s unruly pack.

She wonders, looking at the edge of a disassembled fuma shuriken, if it’s because she grew up as a civilian with civilian parents and a whole world beyond the scope of how best to hone a child into a weapon.

If that’s what the rage is for.

If her childhood is what holds the anger in its tiny nail-bitten fist.

Saturday, they’re eating with the Rookie 9 and Sakura is watching, more than participating in the debate on S&R contingency tactics. Everyone is engaged, only a little rowdy with sake. It’s a nice idea, S&R: finding back someone, saving them, saving them again when things go wrong, making sure to get home safely. You, your team and your heart intact.

“Right, but if I’ve got a close-range taijutsu specialist,” Kiba says around a piece of pork, “I’m not gonna fucking skirt tail to a way station.”

Something churns in the back of her chest, close to her spine.

She taps a piece of tofu on her plate. Doesn’t eat it. Sets her chopsticks on her hashioki instead, fingers trembling minutely, easily buried under a movement to adjust her sleeves.

“Hm?” Sasuke leans towards her, like she asked a question.

Sakura supposes she sorta did. Exhale, she orders herself. Relax into the feeling of Sasuke’s thigh pressed to hers and Naruto’s arm across the back of both of them. “Nah,” she says anyway, tugging on a particularly curly kink of his hair gently, then tucking it back behind his ear where it can try to escape again. Sasuke rolls his eyes, smiling his small smile and eats another carrot.

The conversation carries on.

She looks back at the table to find two sets of eyes on her. Shikamaru’s: bright, calculating behind his slouch across the way and Naruto’s: leaning into her right side instead of toward Kiba, now, so soft and easy.

Sakura sticks her tongue out at Shikamaru who rolls his entire head in response, and tugs on Naruto’s hair too, just because.

Naruto kisses her palm in return, like she too, is soft and easy, instead of calloused and prone to violence. The churning-wondering moves to the back of her mind, just for a bit. Later, she’ll deny blushing. For now, she’s bracketed in either side, safe as they can make her be.

“Remind us where your bleeding-out civilian is in all this, again, Kiba?” Shino asks, absolutely bland.

Laughter blossoms across the whole table and Kiba sputters.

Saturday, Sakura doesn’t have to use her rage.


	3. Chapter 3

It shouldn’t be surprising really, people not understanding the rage Sakura’s carrying around like a timed explosive tag.

After all, she thinks, sitting on the ground with her team as they fuck about making nature candles out of their own earwax in the market square, just because Sai dared Naruto to, watching onlookers scurry away from them and not-so stifle annoyance – no one really understands Team 7.

All of them laugh about it in bloody back alleys, comparing callouses.

They raise their eyebrows together with people unlucky enough to be paired on missions with them. They roll their eyes with the Konoha 12 over it, loving elbows into calloused ribs, but in the end, all that too sticks under Sakura’s tongue, cavity tacky and vaguely rotten. 

(They shouldn’t have to be what they are.)

Konoha doesn’t understand what it’s mutated them into, even if it seemingly cedes them spaces to exist.

If they stay in line, it’s fine. But, their place here is begrudging sometimes, feared others, mostly, treated like little tools to be carefully pruned back into shape when their trauma bubbles up into biting vines that latch onto homes and hopes. 

Kakashi’s role is fixed.

Their sensei, the person who’s gone to sword for all of them, the mess of depressive nonsense so multi-talented he’s convinced his own self that he has to do everything because he’s the last one standing. He is Konoha’s most versatile tool. And he can’t let anyone do anything to try and change that.

Yamato, too. Is cut and dried from the same cloth, too often used.

She’s their senpai, bending where Kakashi snaps - adaptable and ergonomic of a blade. Assigned to them for nature manipulation specialization, but somehow - maneuvered to stay in between endless masked missions across land belonging only to itself. She’s carved oak, hidden in other leaves, empty of what it means to not constantly be ready to die by fire. 

Sai is something in question, mixed up and spat out and pulled back under council fingers.

They’re too many things slumped on the side of too little things, brainwashed child soldier, long distance support, tracker, art teacher, but Naruto’s managed to keep them pretty firmly on the side of hospital patient for a while now.

And Naruto, Naruto’s role is always going to have weight, always going to be their own determination.

Naruto is being trained to be Konoha’s spymaster. None of them have said much about it except to request occasional dango from that tiny shop on the border of Lightning.

“It’s interesting.” Naruto says once near the beginning, half shrugging as they heal their own torn open thigh. Two weeks in Earth Country, with a stopover in Rain, but they aren’t talking about that or the network Naruto is building out from brothels and cloudy dance clubs, the sweet sticky smell of other people on their skin, now, so often. “I like learning about people.”

“Duh.”

_You like proving people previously thought of as contacts and whores and informational coordinates are actual people_, Sakura thinks, but doesn’t say.

They’re not talking about it. About what it means for Naruto to take over the informational network of an old man who thought it would be fun to force Naruto, 12 year old Naruto, to henge half-naked for his own fucked-up pleasure, to do so many other things they’ll never know because Naruto forgives too easy and loves too hard. But, the same man was supposed to be their godfather, supposed to be so many things other than fucked off and –

Nope, nothing about that.

Sakura very, very gently upends the soap bottle into the bath.

“Did you learn that Iwa has a lot of people that hate you?” Sasuke asks, from his spot on the sink counter, foot kicking out towards Naruto’s thigh.

Naruto laughs and flings blood everywhere.

“Not on me!” Sasuke shakes like one of his cats.

Head just above her bubbly bathwater, Sakura splashes around to narrowly avoid droplets and sends an overpowered water jutsu back in Naruto’s face in defense. The laughter rises to shouts and Sakura smirks and knows they’re fine.

Naruto treats spywork like in interesting Who’s Who game and violent threats towards their person like offers of friendship. They started all of this after that trip with _him_. They’d come back a little different, a little quieter.

It was. Horrible.

Back then, Sasuke had stared at Naruto, snapped a curt, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Naruto hadn’t answered, was just _quiet_. Sakura’s fingers had drawn enough chakra to start shaking and wooden floors followed with a crackling rumble. They’d blockaded Sakura’s old apartment with enough chakra to get ANBU called on them. Sasuke left the village for 18 days while Sakura coaxed conversations out of Naruto and she never let them see, but Sakura shook for months straight, choking on her own violence. 

When Sasuke returned bloody, he gave Sakura a vicious, twisting grin and she smiled back, “Lovely,” and destroyed a training ground.

Naruto watched their exchanges from the circle of both their arms, both their protective hackles raised mountain high. Blue eyes clear and understanding and Naruto still didn’t talk about it, but they started talking more about _plans_, about the need for them to be strong, to be well positioned. Started practicing silencing tags to talk with Kakashi-sensei about things they wouldn’t share with Sasuke and Sakura, which hurt, but was better. Was what they could all manage.

(Kakashi disappeared for a bit too, but he waited until Naruto took their next long term mission out of the village and then came back ice cold, a newborn scar curving red over his wrist. Sakura didn’t trust herself to come back, to not destroy everything in her path if she left, so she shoved herself into T&I and tried to smother her rage in disgust.)

But the first spy mission Naruto did complete, all of them were 17 and fucked up.

Dealing with Naruto’s reawakened familial trauma, dealing with Sasuke shivering through the night, barely 9 months back from his mission to Oto and Sakura was breathing more fury in every day than she’d ever felt before, let alone knew how to deal with. Naruto comes back from making contact with the deep cover nin in Key Country, squeezes the three of them into their shitty old bathroom, slaps seals on the surfaces, turns around and throws up.

“Naruto –“ Sakura has a hand hovering over their back half a second later.

Sasuke cusses a storm, turns around to the seals and adds his own bleeding additions. His voice is barbed, “What happened?”

“I –” Naruto chokes, throws up again.

Sakura adds some cusses of her own to Sasuke’s and carefully checks Naruto over visually before drawing a mild healing jutsu. She waits a tense two seconds before Naruto gives a jerky nod, to press her hand to Naruto’s sweaty, dusty travel clothes. They shiver under her hands.

“”no’ injur’d.”

“Well, you’re obviously not healthy,” Sasuke snaps and Sakura cuts him a warning look. They’ve dealt with PTSD and shock more times than they can count. _Get your shit together_, she warns Sasuke with her eyebrows. He bites down on his lip and a flicker of lighting dashes up and down his arm.

_He doesn’t have all his shit together. Left half of it behind in Oto_, Sakura knows. She bites down on her own tongue. _Stupid, stupid_, she cusses at herself and then shakes and tries to focus on being the level headed one.

Finally, Sakura digs through Naruto’s last armor layer and gets her hand on Naruto’s skin, lower back, someplace without sealing tattoos. They shiver more violently and then all at once, lose that horrible sick tension, slumping back into Sakura’s hands.

“’ve got you,” she whispers to them, breathing in salt, nose in Naruto’s messy hair, clinging back to them. The jutsu feeds back what Naruto said, though. Nothing physical. Hard to tell always, with Kyuubi and Naruto’s own chakra, but usually there’s overactive cells, heat, to showcase a healing and Naruto is just. A bit cold, tired.

Touch-starved.

Sasuke drops beside them, grabbing for Naruto’s bare skin, too. When his hands land on Naruto’s cheek and neck, Naruto shivers once more and then exhales so hard they choke.

“Idiot,” Sasuke says to them, rubbing careful, chakra-warm fingers along Naruto’s tense neck.

They sit like that for a while, bathroom tiles hard under their sprawled knees and the sharp smell of bile beginning to permeate the room.

“Tell Tsunade –“ Sakura begins.

“No,” Naruto’s voice is flat black.

Sakura closes her eyes.

“I _have_ to do _this_,” Naruto said, gasping on the last word, like it had a whole horror novel within it. “I’m the only one who – the best to –“ Naruto cuts themselves off.

“Okay,” they both say and they stay there for an hour.

The choice is one Naruto makes and they have to respect but both Sakura and Sasuke are loose cannons for weeks of missions afterwards. Volatile, they snap at anything that comes too close to Naruto, including each other and Naruto, until finally one of them accidentally knocks one of Naruto’s antique planters over. Naruto's eyes go faintly purple before they open the door and shove both of them out it.

“Get your shit together!” Sakura’s words in Naruto’s upset mouth feel harsh. Too necessary. 

They slam the door shut.

(They open it later, when Sakura and Sasuke return with potting soil and new garden gloves, smiling small, forehead pressed to the door jam. Both Sakura and Sasuke have to face that this is a thing that’s happening and they need to do more than respect Naruto in it, they have to support them. Because this, Naruto shaky from kicking them out of their house even if just symbolically for an afternoon, this is not acceptable.)

The throwing up incident doesn’t repeat.

In stops and starts, they all get better at knowing what Naruto needs when they come back, and how to follow this chosen path. Their friends eye them carefully over dinners when they start them back up again.

“Yeah?” Neji asks, quietly and Sakura rolls her eyes a bit and Neji nods with a rueful smile and they’re given space to get their shit together.

They’re shinobi.

The rest of Team 7 know, but they aren’t intertwined in bed with them. It’s different. Sai is acerbic but also gives Naruto a new brush, tiny, better for miniscule work. Yamato creates houses, micro-villages with traps on every surface, for them to have to memorize in 5 minutes and track leaf-bugs through. Kakashi just watches and guides and watches some more and talks with Naruto behind sealed doors. So, their training sessions are careful solo work for a good long while until everyone settles into this new Naruto. Still loud, still hectic to the point of vibrant, but now showing a poised, silky, directed brilliance.

“I think I can talk to Kurama’s family,” Naruto whispers against Sakura’s lips in the middle of a particularly good fuck. Sasuke’s on the other side of them and Naruto’s just been jolted perfectly against Sakura by his hips. Pleasure is igniting in her stomach, her clit and it chases through her whole body.

When Sakura comes a second later it’s with the biggest “What the fuck,” she can muster without any air in her body.

“Shhhh,” Naruto says shakily, their own afterglow still trembling their arms around Sakura’s shoulders.

“Did you purposefully wait until I was about to fucking orgasm to –“ Her voice is gaining momentum as she props herself up to breathe, nearly hitting Naruto in the head. She so regrets being on the bottom.

“Shhh!” Naruto tries to puppy-dog eyes at her. Like that’s close to fucking working. She jabs them in their ribs.

Sasuke’s hand snakes around Naruto’s neck and drags their head back. He still hasn’t come. 0 to Sakura and Naruto’s 2 each, now. The tension in his jaw drives his voice so deliciously rough, “What the fuck, Naruto. In the middle of –”

Naruto whines, “Is that really the most important thing right now?”

“Yes,” Sasuke says. Sakura shoves at Naruto’s arms still propped around her and finishes, “It is.”

Huffing, Naruto lets their head drop neatly onto Sasuke’s naked shoulder, and turns to latch their teeth sloppily onto his pulse. He grunts and his entire body jerks, hand tightening on Naruto's neck, before dropping down to curl heavy across their chest. The motion of his hips into Naruto's starts up again.

Sakura glares at Naruto as their eyes peek open in victory.

They wink at her.

She sticks her tongue out in return and Naruto’s eyes follow it, follow the flex of her throat. She has half a second where she could stop them, could roll and punch through the chests both of the shinobi’s sprawled on top of her, and then Naruto’s mouth is back on her, suction drawing the blood in her pulse instantly up to the surface. She jerks, just a tiny bit. 

They’ve always been good at this. Sakura would be mollified if she wasn’t still fucking confused. Talk to the Kyuubi’s _family_, what. In the middle of her fucking orgasm, what.

“Wanted cover,” Naruto whispers against Sakura’s neck.

She pauses, refuses to admit it’s trepidation that makes her swallow hard.

Sasuke’s gone tense over Naruto’s shoulders too, though he doesn’t stop moving. She forces herself not to check the perimeter, a dead giveaway, but her chakra starts pooling anyways. There’s at least 7 weapons within her arm span and 12 ways she could defend both of them without any of them, right now.

“Mm,” Naruto hums against her, rolling their hips. Their chakra blooms outwards, all warm and smothering. A comfort blanket. They shake their head just a bit.

Both Sakura and Sasuke exhale.

“You’re safe,” Sasuke says at normal volume, coupling it with a long caress down Sakura’s arm, “We’re safe.” His eyes flash red and Sakura squirms for a different reason, imagining her and Naruto sweaty against their sheets, under Sasuke, imprinted into his memory perfectly forever. Always fucking gets her.

_Focus_, she reminds herself.

“What,” Sakura starts, low as she can.

Naruto taps on the hollow of her throat with their nose.

“Bah,” she mutters in frustration.

Laughter curls through the air.

Naruto somehow shuffles their hand under Sakura’s head, pulls her up even as they’re shoving back into a particularly hard thrust from Sasuke. She follows them up, going easily where Naruto pulls her up to their shoulder, loving the feeling of her breasts pressed to Naruto’s chest, loving the way Naruto so easily tucks all the of them so, so close. Sakura’s hand squeezes around the sticky curve of Sasuke’s misshapen shoulder blade and feels herself clench.

Sasuke’s curling forward too, catching Sakura’s lips at Naruto’s urging. He tastes like dinner, like quiet desperation.

Bright and blue, Naruto leans into the join of their lips, nose bumping theirs. Sakura wants to kiss their nose ring, but, “Th’ bijuu wanna _talk_. Lower _and_ greater yokai,” Naruto barely breathes and Sakura stops breathing.

Naruto slides the words into a wet kiss seamlessly, distracting, the three of them joined in a way that never makes sense, makes the most sense of all. Sasuke gasps into Sakura’s mouth and a second later, she feels Naruto’s hips canting, muscles rippling along her own stomach like a wave. Sakura can’t resist moving with them, her mind is churning, the fucking Bijuu, _Naruto_ – even as she bites down on Sasuke’s lip, because she can’t not.

Naruto laughs, loud and free, “Yeah, yes.” Not looking at all like they’re sharing state secrets over sex. They slide a hand down Sakura's stomach, three calloused fingers inside her easy as anything and Sakura digs her nails into Sasuke's shoulder and feels blood.

“Fuckers,” Sasuke bites both of them back.

After they’ve all come again, and flopped over the sheets, not touching because all of them run hot and this is hotter than hot, Sakura stretches her arms out to the wall. She thinks about the fact that Naruto is orchestrating a revolution of tailed beasts and forming a support network for disenfranchised civilians across nations while Leaf thinks they’re just taking over a network of bath-house informants.

“Job’s gotta be good for something,” Naruto mumbles into the pillow.

“Yeah, you have never been _that tight_ before,” Sasuke says, with all the grace of a wild boar. But he’s carefully got his face turned away and his chakra is too carefully placid to be truly nonchalant.

Sakura rolls her eyes as Naruto shoves at Sasuke, but then Sakura spends a bit longer staring at the ceiling thinking about what exactly Naruto is picking up in brothels and underbellies of cities and yes, just how much their sex life has . . . evolved recently.

Sakura reaches over to stab Naruto’s side again.

“Hey!”

When they dislodge from Sasuke’s nougie to glare at her, she leans over them on an elbow. “So,” she says, reaching without looking to shove Sasuke into the mattress beside them.

“Umf,” he faceplants into the pillow and then pushes up to glare at Sakura, “Excuse –“

Sakura slaps chakra into her hand and shoves him back down. He makes a quiet sound, breathier now, and Sakura rubs her thumb in circles along his spine. He shivers and Naruto does the same. Blinking slowly, Naruto looks up at Sakura from under her arm, just as twisted and caught as their peachy hair around all their ear piercings.

“What else,” she shoves a knee in between Naruto’s, “you got?” Sakura asks.

And Naruto grins slowly, canines just a bit too long. They lunge and Sakura finds herself on her back beside Sasuke so fast she can’t even follow. _So fast._ Her reflexes stutter with the urge to grab a kunai, to grab onto Naruto's hips and grind. Naruto’s got a hand pressing both of them down, now, absolutely silent even as their nails get longer and the heat of Naruto’s chakra turns visible red.

Sakura’s breath catches. 

“Well,” Naruto says, and proceeds to focus on making both of them lose their minds with an intensity Sakura’s barely seen outside new ninjutsu techniques.

“Okay,” Sakura pants up at the ceiling, “Nice.”

Sasuke cusses loud and long.

But mostly, they don’t talk about it at all. It’s too dangerous.

And because they’re the only ones privy to some very nice demonstrations of Naruto’s new skills, and no one is talking about anything to do with spies ever publicly, most the village just assumes Naruto’s joined ANBU. That’s why, they think, Sakura and Sasuke got upset. That’s where Naruto’s started disappearing to.

Not duplicitous enough to be a spy, they think, ANBU surely is just improving Naruto’s stealth. And when Naruto goes into the Hokage tower, people just assume they’re in to do more boring paperwork that Tsunade ignores in favor of sake. Instead, Naruto is three countries away negotiating an information train across seven ramen stands. Oh and when the paperwork gets too much because maybe Tsuande is stuck in large jutsu work and Naruto spends the night at the tower, people just assume that’s just blind dedication, maybe a not too-well-concealed ANBU assignment.

When Sakura or Sasuke have to come drag them out a day or two after and it’s funny if they’re all rumbled and a bit torn up, people overlook the darker shade of Naruto’s arms and the wobble to their chakras. Team 7’s always been rowdy with each other and Sakura and Sasuke are mad with Naruto anyways, for joining ANBU, right.

It’s all very plausible and domestic.

Really, it's all of those things and so much more. Sakura is furious and frustrated and glad to see every inch of that old sleeze-ball eradicated from Konoha’s spy network and glad to see Naruto explore something wholly theirs – to be good at it, naturally, without gritted teeth and 200 tearful attempts. Naruto is the best choice. It will always be better to see deadly, twisting, information in Naruto’s hands instead of anyone else’s. Naruto will always take that burden and make it into something hopeful.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t an idiot too careless with their own safety, though.

“As if I could keep it from you two,” Tsunade just shrugs apropos of nothing, four days after the first time they pull Naruto out of a recon gone down an S bend. Not a word about her former teammate, about what this means. She finishes signing the mission scroll and says, “Don’t let the snapflies bite your ass.”

Naruto thinks they can do good being Konoha’s spymaster. For now.

Sakura bares her teeth in a smile, thinks of Naruto’s shaking limbs against bathroom tile, against their shared sheets, determined to save people as only they can. Takes the scroll.

For now, that’s that.

\--

What’s less clear cut is the other two of them.

Sasuke is the last Uchiha in Konoha. Sasuke is gentle with his hawks and snort-laughs at Sakura and Naruto being stupid in changing rooms. Sasuke is moon layers cracked to a grieving dust core.

“Hey, you two,” Sasuke says, leaning heavy into their clawed-for domesticity.

He’s carrying a bag of onigiri, home pristine from assignment after assignment, having found a solution not recommended in the mission scroll. He’s never more than four and never less than one country away from Fire, because Kohnoha is scared of his potential, his already realized power. After laughter-filled training and holding kunai so delicately they don’t hurt insect wings, Sasuke screams himself hoarse into the night. No one comes to the echoing training fields because the screaming is what Konoha expects and Sasuke shakes into their scratched arms and says nothing because the expectation is accurate and so, so horribly exhausting.

He stamps Uchiha fans on all of his clothes and weapons and picks up the rubble of the old military police building with a sharp, “I’m doing this.”

Konoha is scared of his seething mass of traumatic horror threatening to bite revenge into the throats of the council every-damned-deserved-day. (Especially after cleaning up their own mess in Oto for two fucking years, not just Sakura rages.) Sasuke burns blame-hot enough it scorches the ground around the council and the Hokage and they walk on wires above him, while he eyes them like prey. It doesn’t matter that Danzo is gone, that Kakashi ripped apart his atoms with mangekyo. Kakashi did it because Sasuke couldn’t do any of it and Konoha couldn’t stand to lose Kakashi, but –

“They couldn’t prove anything,” Kakashi said, simple and so fucking loaded. Empty and so fucking on fire, for Sasuke, for the other 13 year old Kakashi knew that got cracked open and rendered insane. 

It doesn’t matter that the roots of Root, of that betrayal, got torn out, because something still seeded that in Konoha’s soil. 

“I know how to cook,” Sasuke raises a no-duh eyebrow at her when they move in together. And it is a fucking no-duh, because he lived his childhood alone in a compound with ghosts for company after Konoha let someone break his family’s mind and kill his future – just like they did with Kakashi and Naruto and Yamato and Sai and Sakura screams into the sun and the moon. (Silent, silent, they don’t talk about it.)

So, Sasuke exists in the village in a sort of limbo he and them are constantly trying to settle into something solid.

“Hey, Sasuke,” Naruto nudges his side so often Sakura looks for bruising.

“Stop it,” Sasuke says, which is sometimes good and means reassurance. But sometimes, is not and does not.

Team 7 is not enough against the weight of an entire clan, a life not taken, but stolen nonetheless. So, Sasuke goes distant sometimes, doesn’t know how to put words to the ocean of blood in his past that drowns his lungs inside-out.

Sakura would punch that ocean for him, would dive into the dark with gored eyes and throat crushed but that’s not the point. Naruto would follow her down with a supernova in their palms, but that’s not it either. Sasuke hasn’t made a lot of choices, hasn’t had a lot of room to make any in his life and that’s the position they must put themselves behind him for, silent and unable to take on the weight of for him.

V formation only goes so far.

Temporary teams shout, “Dinner?” to Sasuke and he hums and flickers away to their house to sharpen a sword and ignore the both of them. 

An assassination mission eval will slap on comments about his absolute mission silence, "unhealthy, untenable," but then fucking pass him and sign off for the next scroll, which he just takes and takes until one day he can’t. Punch-quick, Sasuke slips from sharply acerbic with the two of them, biting at their kindness and their shoulders in bed, to cold, hollowed out, tired.

They don’t talk about that.

Too much, it feels like the weight of all the things they don’t talk about, crushes Sakura’s battle-hardened bones. She tries to push back at it and doesn't always succeed. It doesn’t mean they don’t communicate other ways though, Sakura tries to remind herself to cool the rage that follows the crushing like a bruise.

Mid-spring, she tracks shoe imprints Sasuke’s left like breadcrumbs across the village, subtle forget-me-not chakra leading her from their house to an old training field that’s more marsh than forest floor. She pauses at the edge of Sasuke’s peripheral vision, waits.

He’s beating up on metal studded training posts again.

After a moment of silence, she takes it for the answer it is and raises a small mound of ground with a simple earth jutsu to flop down on.

“What’d the posts do to you?” Sakura leans her chin on her hand, doesn’t bother telling him to stop. That’s not why he left this trail for her.

“Hm.”

“Eloquent.”

She flops back against the wet grass.

Distantly, tangled in the thicket of the village, she can feel Naruto’s toobigtoohot rolling mass of chakra peek over towards the both of them like a living wave. Checking in. 

“Honestly,” Sasuke says, pausing like he’s going to say more and then cutting himself off and going back to his punches.

Sakura agrees.

Sometimes she can’t believe other people can’t feel Naruto like a supernimbos cloud above them all the time. She feels she can’t breathe for all the space Naruto’s chakra takes up.

But other people aren’t on their frequency.

Well, Kaka-sensei is, maybe, Sakura thinks. He stares at Naruto sometimes, lost like being subsumed, close to realizing he never had a chance of knowing what to do with all of the hope and power and punch inside Naruto’s gold frame. Like seeing something else.

Naruto smiles at him like always.

Oblivious.

A picture perfect rendition of Kushina and Minato smashed together.

(The things they don’t talk about.)

Sakura sighs and there’s a pause in the next thud of Sasuke’s fists against the posts.

“I’m fine,” she says.

Silence.

“Finer than you’re going to be when Naruto gets done kicking your ass for not wrapping your hands.”

The slightest scoff. He keeps at it and Sakura keeps him company because that’s what she knows how to do, that’s what he’s asked.

Sure enough though, Naruto’s pissed when they finally get there half an hour later.

“What the fuck,” Naruto hisses and Sakura smiles up at the sky.

“I’m fi –“

“The fuck you are, what the fuck, Sasuke. How many times have I told you to wrap your knuckles?”

“A lot,” Sakura offers.

“Shut up,” Sasuke says to her, then turns back to Naruto, “Shut up.”

“Make me,” Sakura yawns.

“You’re so _stupid_,” Naruto is muttering, under their breath, under the swish of medical bandages and the slight inhale that signals they’ve just doused Sasuke’s hands in disinfectant. “I just don’t want you to have avoidable repeat strain injuries, ‘Suke,” they continue, softer, “I’m not trying to – I’m not holding you back with med-nin babble, I just. Why – “

Sakura leans up on one elbow then, to glare at Sasuke, but he’s already glancing at her, looking back to Naruto with a wince in the edges of his body language, curling closer to Naruto.

“Hey,” he says, a sweet stuttering sort of cajoling. “Hey, I know. But, I can handle a few splinters.”

As if that’s all it is. The torn meat of Sasuke’s delicate hands, the tremors barely there along his shoulders. He’s been here probably 3 hours before Sakura got back home from her mission and followed his breadcrumbs.

“’ve been really, really rough to your body really young . . . too many microfractures already.” Naruto mutters some more, still looking down at the bandages. “Not actually comparable to th’ average ninja population.”

They’re not even 19. They’ve been hurt and healed so much already they’ve formed a resistance.

“Okay,” Sasuke allows, after a brief visible frustration claws along his spine.

Naruto sighs, closing their too-blue eyes. They lift Sasuke’s hands carefully, pressing them to their chapped lips.

“Please, just be safe,” Naruto whispers, a thread of sound.

Sakura pulls the grass up around her by the roots.

“I am,” Sasuke’s voice has gone hoarse. “I am.”

_We’re with you,_ Sakura thinks at Naruto, like a bolt, like a blanket, _With you is the safest anyone has ever known, don’t you know._

Naruto scuffs their sandal on the ground and looks too quiet.

Snake seal and Sakura shoves her chakra in a push of earth towards Sasuke, unbalancing his legs, tipping him forward and – 

There. Sasuke is kissing Naruto like he’ll die if he doesn’t, like the both of them are dying anyways and this isn’t a reprieve, but he’s got to do it anyway because they’re _dying and_ – they are and Sakura knows it. They’re ninja and their life is to die by threads, by miniscule shuriken, by seconds of misplaced reactions and too slow fingers. Sasuke’s bone white layered hands cup the sides of Naruto’s sun brown cheeks and they kiss and kiss until Naruto’s hands come up to clutch at Sasuke’s back.

This is Naruto dying, too.

Sakura exhales long and hard and stretches out a hand before her eyes to mime pinching the two of their heads with her fingers.

Idiots.

She drops her arm on her knee and leans her chin back on it, watches without shame, with permission.

Her idiots.

Sasuke pushes his fingers under Naruto’s ears, into their flyaway hair. The thudding river pulse of Naruto’s chakra against the fragile split skin of Sasuke’s palms feels loud even to Sakura, as a tide of Naruto’s yang healing strains, begs to be put to use. Instead, Naruto kisses back, fervent, gentle, idolizing. Their hands press harder to the smooth muscle of Sasuke’s shoulders.

Sakura reaches out a thread of her chakra this time, to gentle along the edges of the wave of Naruto’s, guide them away from Sasuke. They cling back, tacky with too much wind-water yearning, like submerging half her body in a geyser. A dozen cuts from the mission heal in a rush across her arms. Her breath catches on the next exhale and she siphons away some of the excess into her storage seals, boosting her reserves, knowing it will make Naruto smile.

Tender fragile things, shinobi hearts that have split themselves in three. Bursting at the seams of clouds, and declaring themselves dangerously on the horizon line. The whole of spring can stretch inbetween the catch of her teammates’ lips. Sakura knows this intimately.

After a long few moments together, they turn to her like the changing of the seasons.

She digs her heels into marsh and looks them right in the eyes.

Sometimes, Sakura lives up to the blooming in her name. This she knows from the intimacy of their arms; the power she blossoms to and grows from within them.

They come to her as one. One knee down in the dirt beside her, one caging her in, Naruto is bursting sunrise cresting devotion skylines Sakura can’t help tilting her head back for. Sasuke keeps one bloodied hand in Naruto’s hair when they lean forward to kiss Sakura senseless, but the other one reaches out to run along Sakura’s arm, down to her knee, down to her hip, back up her thigh, restless.

She grabs at him, pulls Sasuke tight to the two of them stumbling, by yanking and pushing his hand down hard into the dirt.

Sasuke mumbles something into Naruto’s shoulder, to Sakura’s hair, but then he’s letting himself tumble forward and they’re falling into a beautiful pile of dirty leaves. Their weight sinks against her bones. She sighs out and Naruto breathes in her air.

There.

The screaming of their world quiets to something other than death for once, for this soft, slick, sustained touch between them. Sakura loses track of time after she bites down on Naruto’s lip and they gasp and turn their head to Sasuke like asking for the both of them – asking her to share the points of her canines with them. She grins into eagerness and obliges.

Sometime later, lips raw and heart thudding steady, Sakura turns her head on Sasuke’s thigh to find him staring at the two of them flopped over his legs.

His eyes are warm, pinched, crowded as a summer storm. So familiar. Too much.

_Oh_, Sakura thinks.

His tense stomach muscles against their wandering hands finally make sense and she could shout – _I wish the world had never taught you to _endure_ things_, but.

Sasuke needs to leave for a while. That’s what this is. Sasuke needed them both here but her first to see this, and then to explain to Naruto and then to get her own goodbye.

Sakura threads her fingers in Naruto’s tousled strawberry gold hair and tugs.

They sit up. Sakura curls backwards, arms curling around her knees without asking. Naruto frowns, looking between the two of them for a long moment. Sasuke is impassive, but Sakura’s itching lips twitch into a sad smile. Naruto’s face twists, entire emotions on display and they kneel up towards Sasuke, one hand reaching back to Sakura’s forearm like that’s their balancing rung.

“When’ll you –“ Naruto starts, stops. Their throat works hard for a moment.

A question they don’t ask because Sasuke can’t answer.

Sasuke cuffs Naruto’s chin far too gently. He takes a hold of Naruto’s face for a moment, so strong it colors Naruto’s skin pale and then passes Naruto over to Sakura’s hands. They eye each other for a long second. She raises an eyebrow just a bit and Sasuke nods a fraction. _Okay_, she thinks, at him. They’ll hear from Taka then, at some point. That’s what they have to trust in.

Sasuke is what they have to trust in.

_Okay_. Sakura pulls Naruto as close as they can cling. Sasuke stands and maybe just barely glances back.

The training ground shakes with lightning and then it’s just them. She could lay her heart down on the empty mud and leave it. She wants to. But, the rage also alights when she thinks of letting anyone know how cut in three they are with Sasuke gone.

“C’mon,” Sakura gets to her feet, hefting Naruto in her arms. Sasuke will have asked Kakashi or Yamato or someone to come by and cover for his absence.

Naruto lets Sakura carry them to Iruka’s, where Naruto’s adoptive parent opens the door, looks at Naruto and shoves eir own exam-season tiredness down with a swallow and offers to make ramen together.

Like all salt water forms a part of a cycle, they too, continue rotating on. Mission, dinner, quiet lonely sex, what passes as social time with Konoha 11 side-eyeing them, waiting by the door, bird carrying two pressed petals from Juugo from Sasuke, waking up with an alarm clock instead of a Sasuke-clock. Shades of monochromatic necessity.

20 days later, Sakura walks out of the bathroom toweling her hair dry to find Sasuke climbing in through their bedroom window.

The world lunges into clarity, her heart locking closed like a house gate. In the space between Sasuke’s thumb and index finger gripping the wood frame, the clamoring in her head screeches to silence. She swallows and drops the towel on the ground, which is sign enough for the two of them. Sasuke’s lips quirk into his small grin.

She loves him.

“Get scuffs on the ledge and die,” she says, heading into the closet.

“Hospitality,” Sasuke says.

“That’s dead, too.”

Then, Naruto barrels into the room to tackle Sasuke out the window. Sakura finishes dressing as she hums over their shouting and leans her head out to watch them tussle. Lingers until she knows their neighbors are leaning out their own windows, not daring to curse Naruto and Sasuke, but daring to glare anyways.

Sasuke always comes back, and sometimes even that seems too much to ask.

The point, though, Sakura reminds herself, watching Sasuke frying fish for all of Team 7 that night, is that Sasuke’s future is undecided. The point is they ask, and stay and remind him of choice.

That they keep their hearts open as a choice.

\---

What’s less clear cut is Sakura’s role, always.

What everyone thinks it is, is faithful service. What her classmates know it is, is caring for people. What she knows, is that it’s what she carves for herself.

Sakura knows that it will be dusty as old tomes and dirty as her fist crushed into the ground by her own furious strength.

She knows that it won’t be a mirror image of Tsunade, who struggled with teaching her chakra application when she needed it outside of mystic palms technique (who took on Naruto as a student with a lot of wary finger pointing that bristled Sakura’s back). She knows it won’t be as a deadweight chained to two Team 7 comets, since she puts in the time, always more time than them, more studying than them, more utmost, brutal control than them. She knows she’s done more steady 6 month stints – with T&I (fury clenched in her stomach), and R&D (frustrated impatient rage) and the hospital and the mission desk and any other goddamn station since she was 13 – than any other Konoha shinobi.

So, she reminds the brunet chuunin at the mission desk with the 4 earrings she can never remember the name of that, “This report has to be filed with an A-459 addendum within 48 hours.”

She weaves her ambush recommendations into Shikamaru’s battle plans with a “The ferns in this creek bed have spines, actually. And the rockslide two months ago left unstable ground cover.”

_What did you think my test scores fucking meant,_ she wants to shout at them_. Sasuke, top student extraordinaire, cheated off of _me_ in class_, she wants to shove Sasuke into the training ground dirt. _What does my mission record have to have on it for you to see me as me and Konoha for what the hell, for the hell that it is, _the urge to shake them to pieces shoots pain through her fingers.

Instead, she meets their blinking befuddlement with a mild head tilt.

“You’re better at their jobs than they are,” Ino laughs sloppily into Sakura’s neck and Sakura holds her and clenches her eyes shut and doesn’t say _I wanted to be better, but I didn’t want this_, “Better than everyone,” Ino whispers and kisses her temple as Sakura breathes as deep as she can, again and again and again.

Sakura knows so fucking much about Konoha’s shinobi processes, even more about the policies and their execution, because she can’t help absorbing that information, picks it up and then doesn’t have a fucking place to put it down. Then can’t help taking that information and trying to change something – reduce misinformation, increase allowance for orphan medical coverage, less drug use in interrogation, lower goddamn causality rate of genin shinobi, on and fucking on.

Despite everyone looking at her like that. Her name’s not worth more than a couple dozen million in most bingo books and that’s really “Such a petty thing to be mad about,” Ino laughs, and prods Sakura’s hip and grins, “I love it.”

Without revealing a word of dissent, she does the job. (Rage clamors in tiny limbs across the beaten walls of her mind, slings acid from her tongue occasionally, always always curls heavy around the other pieces of her heart she must, must protect –) She is good at being a Konoha shinobi.

Sakura also knows it’s because of this, she’s been slated as a possible kage successor.

Just _possible_, just a service comment toss around, like all other paths they lob at her but this one –

It makes her wanna puke.

It makes her wanna take the hat in her teeth and shake it to pieces and break the entire system apart. Fuck doing it bit by bit. Fuck this long game they’re trying to maneuver. They talk in circles about it every time it comes up in one of Sakura’s evals. All of them around the kotatsu, scarred knees pressed together, arguing their hearts to shreds trying to find the best path. The path that protects the most people.

“We can do so much, so many good things, here,” Naruto insists, quiet in deference to the volume the privacy seals max out on, but emphatic, intense.

They all agree on that.

“We’ve given so much, already.” Sasuke’s voice is an even alarm.

They all agree on that, too.

“If I officially decline, they’re gonna pressure Kakashi even more for it.” They agree here too; Sensei deserves some measure of peace, for fuck’s sake.

“Just push it off,” Naruto says finally, cheeks puffed out, “I did.”

Naruto’s still so fucking idealistic it’s hard to stomach sometimes. They have to believe in the good of people’s hearts, Sakura supposes. That’s the only way the past and the future can come together in their head, It’s not like it hasn’t benefited them all the fucking time, sure. But she’s not Naruto - people don’t see her believing in them as three dimensional people, and toast that belief, that unbe-fucking-lievability back to her, hands raised without violence. She’s bitchy and testy and too intelligent by half and too damn good at this hell. People don't like her as a person.

“Cause the timing’s the only issue,” She grits out.

Stark empty silence clouds between them.

“We’re not enough, yet,” Naruto says, looking at their hands. “Not enough to face them head on instead of,” Shame creeps in around their edges. Or no – not that maybe, but hurt resignation in the form of self-flagellation. The complexity of the situation peeking in through the tense lines of their overworked muscles. Konoha's spymaster. “Like this.”

From in the system. 

Plans and layers and misdirections and governmental systems overhaul - all of them in for the long haul. For the goddamn, better-be-fucking better haul. This, they’ve all agreed on, too.

All of them linger with that for a moment. (Sometimes Sakura thinks the things that they _have_ actually talked about will choke her, too. Like everything they are and try to do and be, has to claw its way down her throat and through her lungs to her heart.)

“Tch,” Sasuke exhales, disgusted, but not at Naruto.

Sakura slams a hand down on the kotetsu because she needs to do something.

“Hey!”

“Sakura.”

“Oh, relax,” She snaps at them, flopping back against the floor and gives them the finger. 

The next few weeks are tense around the Hokage tower, their house. Konoha’s seeing a period of relative peace, and for a rare moment it’s possible for them to plan for the future, to train a new kage under an old one for years to hone them perfectly. If Sakura agreed with the future they were imagining, she’d even think it was a sound, forward-thinking plan.

As it is, her own life comes up like bile and threatens to choke her so often it feels _normal_.

She gets an assignment to bodyguard an unsettled leaf noble stuck in Rain on business. It’s not classified as a diplomatic mission, and it’s only her going. The mission stinks and Sakura scents the burgeoning horror of whatever it’s going to actually unfold to be, that T&I won’t share, the moment she reads the scroll.

It says to take a ninken.

She’d rather not, simply because they asked her to, but Naruto’s in Tea Country meeting in brothels again and they rest of them don’t have enough pull to ask why and get an answer. Sakura walks a fine line with Tsunade for rejecting her teaching. Outright questioning has never been welcome in her office, in Konoha, anyways.

So, she goes to Sensei’s apartment and slices carelessly through 4 tags on the living room window and avoids the lazy chakra net thrown at her. 

Kakashi is upside down on the couch, wearing one sock and eating nori, staring lifelessly at a seal he’s slapdash painted on the opposite wall. Sakura doesn’t have time to wonder what him and Naruto are working on now. Seal work always makes Kakashi go a little distant into his bloody past.

“I’m borrowing one of the new ninkens,” Sakura tells him, instead of asking.

His gaze slides away from the wall with the viscosity of heavy mud to bore into her and the way tension over this fucking mission cloaks her shoulders, has already started her hunching inwards

“Oh,” he says lightly, “is that what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

They stare at each other for a moment.

“Pakkun will be upset if you go without him.” _Take two, be safe,_ Kakashi can’t say.

“I’d be upset if he ruined my demure cover,” She says, more gently than she means to. _You know I can’t, you know I will survive._

Another one of those pesky topics they don’t talk about is Sakura’s name on the Hatake summoning seal.

When they’d started specialization training after becoming chuunin, Kakashi had spent weeks forcing her to navigate by sound alone, eyes bandaged and then sealed her ears so she’d have to try and navigate by smell. She’ll never be as good as a born Hatake, but she’s a terrier that doesn’t let up when she scents blood and has a knack for recognizing poison, took at least those lessons from Tsunade to heart, too. 

Anyways, the dogs love her and a dog’s love is an absolute.

What this also means, is a ninken on this mission is superfluous. She could probably do what the scroll is really asking for, but that’s only because she has been trained to work with ninken. Either someone is testing what she can do or what Kakashi has passed on or can do or what weaknesses the team as a whole has –

Her mind whirls.

She summons Taro, who is fat and squat and mostly just likes to flop on enemies faces. Both Kakashi and Sakura like him fine, but he’s not. Irreplaceable.

Rage curls hard in the base of her throat. Kakashi actually sits up on the couch to watch them go.

“Hello,” Sakura says a day later, Taro rolling at her feet, “I am the Konoha shinobi guard assigned to your mission request. Please verify my chakra against your confirmation scroll.”

“Hmph,” the noble says, looking sickly around the edges, already surrounded by too many guards to need Konoha’s. Stinky, stinky.

Sakura does her job without dissent.

A week later, she is covered in mud and blood and pulling at the six mercs running chakra chains holding her to the suppression seal covering the town’s tiny plaza. Sakura watches her client himself butcher sweet, stupid Taro in two strokes of his cursed tanto, just 20 steps away and hates, hates, hates when she is right.

After the shrill cries die out, Sakura lets herself slump to the earth boneless.

“You were stupid,” her client says, like their air isn’t on a deadline, “We just need one jonin for this.”

Sakura’s chakra is a trapped creature rolling seething fine bloody mist along her own skin trying to escape. It’s been 50 seconds. Sakura’s never been held down longer than 8 minutes. That was by the five members of her own team.

She’d broken 12 of their ribs and sent Sai to the hospital and they’d looked at her different afterwards and _she’d liked it._

The plaza is loud, her own breathing, talking unprofessional hired hands losing focus, Sakura’s client making his way towards her, geta slapping clacks on the stone. Sakura lets her chest ache with each breath and watches through her bangs, waits until the client pauses to lift the tanto – to lick Taro’s blood off of it.

The ocean in Sakura’s ears boils to thunder.

What humans always forget, is just how dangerous a dog is, with one leg in a trap. 

Sakura slams her head hard into the ground. The concussion blooms instantly, but the shake in the stone seal is her chance – she uses the millisecond shift in its suffocating pressure to fold her chakra inwards to her own pressure points. Her left arm goes numb from the elbow down. She waits half a second for the fractional, surprised loosening of the chain on it and rips it free. Blood spills onto her feet. Swinging the arm into her right palm, she slaps blunt healing on herself and fucking finally forms snake seal. Earth release cracks open the ground and she shoves backwards into it.

Mud geysers upwards in her wake like a cocooning tsunami.

It kills them all. 

Beautifully. Satisfyingly. Slow. Suffocating as it crushes with iron laced weight. Sakura pulls it back occasionally, to let it last longer. She’s cold in her tunnel sanctuary.

After a few hours, she escorts her client’s body to the final mission location and dumps the pieces of it on the bed.

The Rain ninja scatter out of her way.

Sakura gets back to the village alone. She turns in her paperwork, the scroll with the body that used to be a Hatake ninken, the scroll with the client’s paperwork that was the real reason for this, does not turn in Taro’s hitae-ate, does her debrief eval and is fine. She pulls out a silencing jutsu that freezes her own vocal chords, to scream for 3 minutes in the shower and is fine.

She meets Kakashi at the memorial stone at dusk with another hitae-ate for their collection and is not fine.

Things go on.

She moves from the two chuunin, plus tokubetsu-jonin scouting team, to backing a young chuunin tracking team that lacks a heavy hitter. Gets recommended for ANBU battlefield topography training. The policy review request she submitted for adjusting ninken-mission client psychological requirements gets approved because she turned it in to Mai with a box of plump apples. Sakura draws additional house wards in her own blood and bites down hard on whatever she can get her teeth around. Honors the good she can, lets the rage steep strong in her belly, counting minutes and measuring what lives can be sacrificed by tea fortune leaves.

That week, letting herself be touched by her own teammates is more than she can take. It’s too hard to feel anything but incandescently furious.

So, she lets herself be both.

Doesn’t regret her choices. 

Sakura’s place is here, collecting heartstrings to wrap around her knuckles and pushing her way through, through, through, to the core of things. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay on this! as you might have noticed, this singular chapter is actually +8k (this fic was supposed to be 10k total before lollllll) and i'm still not sure i'm entirely happy with the way this chapter happens, some of the changes to canon etc., so feedback is v much appreciated!


	4. Chapter 4

Sasuke heads out for a solo S-rank in late March when Sakura is still steeping rage.

The mission’s all classified, all usual, but Sasuke’s quiet is unusually rough and he takes Kusanagi and a pocketful of Naruto’s sealing tags. He looks at them from the doorway for too long. The first night, Naruto and Sakura spend like they always do, enjoying nattō and sweet umeboshi for dinner without Sasuke’s stomach to disagree, feeding the cats, slumping over each other in the living room.

Morning is when worry grows.

The cats scream discontent without their doting parent for over an hour and tension skirts the edges of their minds. Their third is more than more than capable, more than experienced, but it’s harder to conceptualize that to a 5 year old stressor:

Sasuke’s solo-S infiltration mission to Sound, all of them children, god forsaken children breaking under the weight on top of them trying to kill adults, the worse than fuck up rescue mission after 2 years. All of them shattering into dozens of tiny pieces they hurt themselves on when trying to care for each other. Sasuke left again, then, after they finally got out of the hospital. Met Team Taka at the gates, tried to learn how to heal for another 6 months and Naruto had to clutch Sakura’s hand in the dark and whisper hope outloud that they could make Konoha into something that wouldn’t hurt Sasuke or themselves anymore.

And here they all are, still

Her rage balances on a cup’s edge – so, so full. She pushes her hands outward like that will push it away too. They both do some idle paperwork.

Hour four and the house gets quieter as the cats drift into moping. Neither of them have moved from their tangled slouching on the couch where they woke up.

“Sex or onsen or training?” Naruto offers finally, speaking into their silence of an hour and a half. Hand holding Sakura’s bouncing knee, but not stilling it.

She bites her tongue to bleeding. Focus, focus. Take stock of resources.

Naruto’s sigh is soft. They shift civilian-slow, sliding to sit over Sakura’s hips, moving their hand up to Sakura’s jaw, pressing oh, so gently at its heavy hinge.

“ ’Kura,” they whisper. “He’s gonna be okay. He’s coming back. We’re safe. We will always save him.”

Blue eyes intent on her, Naruto’s faith – their determined, reckless _love_ pushes like a physical presence at her mind. They follow it up with an actual wave of yang chakra, soothing, strong.

“Okay,” Sakura whispers back, feeling her cut tongue sharply.

Okay, okay.

She picks training, because suddenly she’s worried she’s going to vibrate out of her skin if she has to stay still one moment longer.

Naruto nods and bounces up. “We’ll do you against 100 of me.”

Swallowing the blood in her mouth, Sakura digs one hand into the back of the couch. Exchanging one tension for another. “Kinda unfair, isn’t that?”

“Shucks,” Naruto pauses, hands on their hips, gold nail polish catching the morning light just right, loose and easy in pajamas with cartoon frogs. Half of everything she needs. “You’re right,” Naruto winks, “We’ll do 200 of me.”

Love, Sakura reminds herself, is what she is also putting her faith in.

She kisses the laughter from Naruto’s lips, knows they don’t care about the blood.

There’s a routine in the in-between of things. Sakura finds ways to occupy herself as she does mission desk shifts so chuunin and tokubetsu jonin can staff the chuunin exams – dango left for Anko on a shelf, shopping for a new wetstone with Tenten, missing Ino by plucking too many flowers out of the ground, dates with Naruto, more simple and sock filled on their own. Lee teaches her a new block with a flower tucked behind one ear. Juugo swings by their house with assurances, stays for dinner and leaves with a dessert pack from Naruto over his shoulder, smiling softly.

The village moves with a spring shower around Sakura’s scarred legs, leaves cluttering sandals and she thinks this is where the village gets them; in the slumbering market dragon fruit, in the shine of children’s wild laughter in the tree rooted streets. They stay here because there’s life. There’s good, sturdy hope in the face of their own mangled minds.

Sakura stays because she is making her choice, her own future. This is where it gets her.

Sasuke comes back two weeks later, bloodied, eyes-closed, but not broken.

“You worrier,” he mumbles, pressing his forehead to her temple, chapped lips catching against her cheek.

“Well,” she says.

On the other side, Naruto is mumbling healing jutsu and the glow suffuses the room. Sakura gets her hands on both of them and holds on.

\---

Early summer, just before the desert starts to boil the air, Sakura and Naruto join a trade escort team back to Suna.

“Hello!” Naruto shouts, bright and awfully early as the morning.

“I’ll write a letter telling Gaara it’s not war, if you kill me,” Temari grumbles from her bedroll, hair peeking chaos as she wiggles to glare at Naruto.

“And leave myself alone with them?” Sakura asks, pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose as the chuunin team with them matches Naruto’s volume for their own good mornings.

Somedays, Sakura is pretty sure Sasuke is wearing off on her, but fuck if she’s admitting that to him.

The days are hot and long and loud.

Fucking finally, the desert slams into the village. Temari leaves off fingering her fan like she’s weighing ramifications and Sakura and Naruto skirt their ways around too many questions about their futures from the Suna elder council by taking refuge behind Gaara’s gourd. Fucking finally, they relax for a night within chuunin underfoot. It’s more crisp outside on the fingertips here with wind channeling through the clay buildings and Sakura keeps her hands moving and thinks about the last time Team 7 was in Suna.

Gaara and Naruto begin their traditional jinchuuriki spar.

Barren Autumn last year, three back-to-back AA ranks with different Sand teams as their support.

It was rough and tumble against a coalition of inter-country missing-nin bandits, holed up way too close to Kigi for comfort. Smash and grab was their complex strategy. It’d worked easy until an entire group of them had a distance chakra absorption kekkei genkai. Still, they were Team 7 (enemies ought to know better, really, her rage thinks cloying and sweet). Sakura and Kakashi got in close and their fists handled what the shock of someone leaning into the nin’s kekkei genkai didn’t. Sakura’d been injured, and so had Kakashi, but it had been worth it. Felt good to hand-feed the violence inside her.

“C’mon Gaara!” Naruto shouts-laughs, like there aren’t massive tentacles of sand trying to squash their defenses.

If Sakura knew less about their love, about Naruto’s need for connection echoed in Gaara’s soft, untouched palms, she might worry about their safety. But this is just for fun. She leaves them be and wanders back alleys with Temari to a low-key civilian bar.

The ground rolls beneath them as the walk, in the wake of the fight. It unbalances her for a moment.

She’d been unbalanced with her fibularis tendons cut last Autumn, too. So bad she’d run into one of the building’s here. Kankuro is absolutely not ever gonna let her live it down.

On sand, Sakura leans heavier into ninjutsu, onto her tanto and chakra control, but she knows she’s just a heart with swinging fists, unbalanced as can be. The Suna siblings are bloodied biting wind, and Temari in front of her is more smooth exactness than Sakura will ever be. The two of them slip into the bar via a hidden crawl tunnel Temari pulls from a scroll on the wall. The corner of the bar is theirs, back to the wall, 4 sightlines. Sakura gets beer. Temari, top shelf sake.

Usual.

As they wait for the food, Temari segues from the planting season to pointedly compliment her, “Nice run thrus with the chuunins this morning.”

“Mm,” Sakura shrugs.

“You had a good teacher,” Temari says, nonchalant as she dips into the sake.

“Too good, probably,” Sakura flips her chopsticks a bit rudely.

“You agree?”

She does, is the thing. But the thing also is, Sakura was teaching katas this morning and Sakura uses Hatake style taijutsu, with a Senju flourish. And that means something.

Her and her sensei use the same clever, close to mid-range fighting with frequent substitution henge and thinking four moves ahead. Because Kakashi learned taijutsu when he was a child (genin at not even half their own genin ages – she rages, she _rages_). He was shorter and smarter than all his opponents, with an average chakra pool, and less muscular frame. He needed speed and precise chakra control for one hit kills, more than the concussive chakra packed fighting that Naruto or layered mixed ken-genjutsu Sasuke got taught to employ.

Sakura takes the cup Temari hands her with a mumbled thanks and downs it. Follows it with 3 more.

Back as a genin, it had shocked her, to think of her and the famous Copycat Ninja as the most alike in their beginnings, body-wise, survival-wise. Softened and infuriated her in equal turns to have Kakashi’s singular attention in forms and punches.

Sakura takes a gulp of her own beer.

Sensei used to make her run through katas until her shoulders went numb. And then he would smile.

She’s had too much to drink on a day she ran through the desert, is also the thing.

But she’s also still raw in ways from Taro, the pointlessness of that blood in the grooves of her fingers. The way Kakashi had said nothing, not even a joke, but closed his unsurprised eye when she’d returned with the hitae-ate. Naruto and Gaara are beyond life, but Sakura is human. So are most of the rest of them.

“Sakura?”

Humans are easily hurt and incredibly fallible. 

Sakura tries often to differentiate between the brainwashed Konoha orphan in Kakashi that had no choice and the traumatized adult that didn’t look for any others until his team gave him no other choice by slowly burning away in front of him. He fought then, fought to be barely a human and did his best, even when it wasn’t enough. She won’t quite say that they’ve all saved each other. Because they’ve hurt each other bad, physical scars to prove it and tetchy unhealthy bonds to scream it. She’s too realistic for that.

People drowning cling to any wood.

But.

A little drunk and listening to Gaara and Naruto play fighting games with their almighty, myth-made-playful tailed forms from half a village away, she can admit impossible things. Dry as the desert and full as just as many cacti, Sakura admits when nudged and asked, “Kakashi Hatake was a sensei miraculously well-fit for all of us. And us for him.”

“Yeah?” Temari asks, in that almost bored way she does when something is vitally interesting.

Naruto isn’t the only spymaster being trained, Sakura knows. She also knows what information is already in the bingo books and if any information about them is going to be safe, it’s going to be with the Suna siblings.

“Yeah,” Sakura says, and eats one of her just delivered hosomaki as payment.

Temari grins wide, nudging her plate over.

Hum dee dum, Sakura thinks for a moment, kicking her foot lightly against the chair, “Alright. I’ll take one for every guess you get right.”

Temari full on laughs, a rough round sound that makes Sakura drink a little too much always and flush a little too hard and admire the shape of Temari’s cheekbones too long. But oh, Sakura thinks, the way the sun bursting through the windows pops gold highlights in her dark skin, _oh_, the way gentleness rushes up uninvited in her heart.

Their friendship has been a wonderful surprise gift to Sakura.

“Alright,” Temari says eventually.

_Good_, Sakura thinks, _let me feel this weird safeness longer. Let me be fallible and human_. When she focuses on the distance, the destruction sounds are still going loud and strong and they’re here for another 18 hours at least.

“You,” Temari starts, then pauses, rolling a thought on her tongue.

Sakura raises an eyebrow. From the outside, she’s objectively the hardest student to link to Kakashi.

“Right,” a huffed rough laugh, “You’re the hardest.”

Grinning, Sakura leans heavily into her palm, slouches over the bar full bodied. “Don’t flatter, Temari-hime.”

Temari waves a hand carelessly and a few picture frames on the wall shake. The very air listens to the the siblings, to Temari especially, down here. It sets Sakura’s spine tingling for a long moment.

“Uchiha,” Temari starts, “Dōjutsu. Chidori. Kenjutsu. Agility.”

“Mm,” Sakura hums and takes 3 pieces. Sasuke’s the easiest, but people also always want to give Kakashi skills he doesn’t have. Fearful of his potential. Kakashi doesn’t prefer killing with swords.

“Hmm,” Temari says back. “That’s interesting.”

Sakura half shrugs.

Temari doesn’t push for more, sitting utterly still. 31 people in the restaurant. Sakura eats her avocado hosomaki payment and watches the only 2 ninja leave out the north-east window, so drunk they’re chakra sticking to the frame.

“Uzumaki.” The drunker of the ninjas – can’t even be even genin up for nominations – barfs all over the window shutters while flopping out. The waiter emanates absolute murder. “Chakra control. Fuinjutsu. Rasengan. Stealth.”

Reasonable deductions and Temari knows Naruto best of the three of them, but Kakashi isn’t a sealing master the level of Naruto and the only thing he helped with Naruto’s Rasengan was adding wind to it.

Sakura taps her chopsticks for a moment and then reaches over to swipe two pieces in half neatly, taking one half of each, plus two whole ones. “Tsk tsk,” she says, lightly.

“You didn’t say halves!”

“You didn’t say not halves,” Sakura counters, a true friend of semantics.

The grinding of teeth is almost audible.

Across the bar, the bartender flips flames in between cups of sake for a bomber. A child is plotting a mashed taro assault, two tables over. Sakura just barely reaches outwards with her chakra and feels the building concussive ocean of Kurama’s joy in the desert. She pulls back quickly.

“Haruno.” Temari says slowly. “Logistics.” She doesn’t say it like a question, because Temari doesn’t do that, but Sakura has to bite back on her grin. “Genjutsu resistance. Nature manipulation.” She pauses, then finishes with “Taijutsu.”

Sakura can’t help glancing over at her at that one, knowing she’s showing too much of a reaction.

“Wasn’t me,” Temari admits, shrugging one shoulder, “Last time you four bulldozed through here, Sasuke said something about you and Hatake tearing the same tendons.”

Restaurant cacophony invades their bubble of silence as a large group stands and leaves. 23 people, now.

“Most people think Tsunade,” Sakura says, too honest, but whatever, life’s terrible and short anyways.

Scoffing, Temari shakes her head, then turns serious, leaning one elbow up on the bar. “Sakura, you,” Temari catches Sakura’s eyes, stilling, “You always go for the kill. First thing, long haul, whatever. You go for the kill with your own bare hands.”

That’s not true about Tsunade and it is true about Kakashi.

It’s true about his taijutsu student.

It was true too, Sakura thinks, about some chuunin Temari knew that ran afoul of Sakura and some sensitive information on a solo-S back 18 months ago in Yume. But, it isn’t blame holding Temari’s muscles, would never with her family’s kill count and it doesn’t make Sakura feel any particular way for this to be known about her, for this to be her. But that’s. Ire percolates at the back of her mind. Thinking.

Possibly, her instinct to kill first is the most known thing about her. She's a reliable killing machine. 

This is something she ought to feel _something_ about.

Isn’t it?

_How does she exist?_

“Well,” Sakura exhales and finally reaches over. Just two whole pieces this time.

Temari cusses up a storm.

“You mean to tell me Hatake didn’t teach you all those freaky mixed water-earth jutsu?” Temari rages.

Sakura kindly pours her another shot and doesn’t say anything.

“What the fucking,” Temari mutters, knocking it back. The bar shakes when she sets down the glass.

Sakura refills it to hide her smile.

Sai and Yamato’s full involvement with their team is a fully saturated secret even inside of Konoha. It’s comforting how much that holds true outside of it. Comforting, she thinks, watching Temari grumble and poke at her side, that comfort isn’t always hard won. Sometimes, it’s given.

Because Temari doesn’t push for the source, doesn’t push for anything they haven’t negotiated and Sakura knows that Gaara won’t with Naruto either, that none of the siblings do with Sasuke or Sai or Kakashi or even Yamato. They’ll see Team 7 as knobby unsettled tools and know the sides of them intimately, but won’t try to cut anything on their edges, will take care to not use them. It’s unfamiliar, to have someone else looking out so precisely for her team, other than her team.

Then again, Sakura knows the shake of Temari’s metal arms in return. She knows the sibling’s history and the bedrock they were carved against as children, too. She knew them at 12, the shape of their small hands around bruises and kunai.

Rage is an ocean with many lighthouses.

Later, Naruto will come to her, flushed and thrilled to be the loser of the match. Incandescent with happiness, Sakura will take their face in her hands and kiss them so thoroughly the ever-present tide doesn’t swallow her.

They’ll both breathe in deep. The desert will echo with early summer stars. Home will be the place where they willingly leave their hearts and return to.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to all the people still reading this and bookmarking this - thanks so much for sticking it out, hope it's worth it.  
this chapter deals with topics like drug use, sticky sexual coercion situations, vague discussion of having sex underage, etc. kind a rabbit hole of experiences, but one the story seemed to want to tell.  
pop me a comment with your thoughts/critiques/etc! <3

The week after they get back, Kakashi hauls them on two bandit-clearing missions by the Yu border, and then all the way down the coast to the Eastern waterfalls.

They train under the disgusting sun, with Yamato’s earth jutsu to strip the rockfaces of any texture or handholds. It is combination water manipulation-taijutsu skills development, and also, inevitably, Naruto and Sasuke cat fighting development. Under the hot pour of two tons of water, halfway up the 800 meter slippery rockface, wet hair sticking to her eyelashes, Sakura shakes her head.

Sai is drawing them down below, calling for them to get naked already, “An artist needs a blank subject!”

“It’s a blank _canvas_, you fuckwit,” Sasuke shouts back, elbowing Naruto in the ribs. Turning in these moments, to all of their delight, into a five year old civilian instead of an twenty year old ninja.

“No can do,” Sai hums, “My canvas already has your tits on it.”

Naruto cackles and chokes on the wave Sasuke slaps them both with.

Sakura, not shockingly, finishes her 200 reps first. Feet up on the loose rocks of the cliff, laying sideways to watch the idiocy below, she pulls out a nail polish bottle and starts redoing her nails in blue.

Beside her, Kakashi sighs.

“Don’t be nostalgic,” Sakura warns him, popping her wrinkly, sore knuckles, “It’s too hot for that.”

“Now Sakura, is that any way to talk to –“

“Sit down and I’ll do your nails next.”

He flops down.

The steady rush of the waterfalls settle between them, broken only by the sound of Sai complimenting Naruto’s ass.

“Does it ever wear on you? Training me while babysitting the rest of them?”

She’s tired.

Annoyed about being tired. Waterfall manipulation and climbing uses a lot of sheer chakra power. Which is why Kakashi makes her drill them after longer missions, under the guise of drilling the whole team on them. River-quick below, Naruto is avoiding Sasuke’s punches by kissing him every time he leans in. Sakura rolls her eyes and blows on her left hand.

“Well, I didn’t think _this_ would be my team to train,” Kakashi says, voice pitched bright and empty.

“Probably not,” Sakura agrees, “But sometimes we get sentimental enough to think that maybe you’d _hoped_ for us, instead.”

Sometimes, Sakura stares at Kakashi’s profile, the covered contour of his broken over-and-over-again nose, his covered borrowed-gifted eye that cries blood, the scar traipsing across his hairline where Naruto pressed on a hemorrhage for 3 hours and kept him alive. Sometimes, Kakashi stares back, eye wide and fingers unclenched. Sometimes, her sensei looks away from her first.

Today, his shoulders give away his flinch, and his eye crinkles up in his depressing fake smile. She ignores it, and finishes painting her right pinkie.

He doesn’t answer.

The echoes of Team 7 against the rocky canyon are peaceful.

“Do you think of me as a waterfall?” Sakura asks after long enough it becomes clear the previous emotion is a thicket Kakashi isn’t going to navigate. Can’t, probably.

“Do you think of yourself as one?”

“Hmm,” Sakura hums and dips her hand into a spray of water from below, setting the polish instantly.

She could be, maybe. She could certainly lose herself in one. The force raging between the valley of Naruto and Sasuke’s outstretched arms. Steady thundering in front of Kakashi and Sai’s sly skipping eyes. Apathy and anger shouting for command of slippery nothingness.

Sweat trickles down the small of her back, making her repress a shiver.

“Hand,” she orders Kakashi, patting her knee.

“Show your sensei proper respect now, pupil,” Kakashi waves his hand in the air, voice lofty and skipping through the air. Like he has any possibility of escape from any of them. Like he has any wish to.

Sakura cracks her own knuckles idly. Just to give him an excuse. Kind, like.

Kakashi drops his hand onto her knee.

Sakura smiles.

Maybe she could be a waterfall.

Could be these waterfalls, if only she was determined by the gravity around her.

But she’s more; weeping willow roots, steeped in the autumn cold, gnarled into bedrock, grown where humans tried to tear her out. She’s something that fought for its right to live where it does. Something whose survival teeters like a _fuck you_ out of the mouth of a broken video recorder. Something that asks why gravity can’t be made instead of experienced.

“I’m not a waterfall,” Sakura says finally.

Kakashi smiles as Sakura finishes painting his hand. “No,” he agrees.

This time, Sakura knows, the smile is real.

“Sap,” she accuses him.

“Absolutely,” Kakashi flings his fingers in the air mimicking the twittering birds circling the rising sounds below. “I’m very emotional, easily overwhelmed, totally soft hearted –“

“Yeah,” Sakura interrupts. “You are.”

The skin around Kakashi’s eye tightens.

“Don’t be angry," she says, after a moment that's too quiet, "that’s my thing.”

Kakashi doesn’t say anything back.

Sakura sighs, pulls her knees up and rest her cheek on them. “C’mon, Sensei, I’m tired.”

“I know,” Kakashi says, unsufferable and light. “Go down and climb back up again. One handed. Take a minute off your time.”

Face still against her knees, she laughs. It catches dry in her throat.

Sensei stands up, glancing over the side of the cliff where the shouting has become a lively tune. His fresh painted hand rests for just a moment, on top of her head, and they breathe together, one inhale, one exhale, before he twists into nothingness.

Sakura uncurls herself, stretching out her limbs across the dirt and shaking them to get the blood flowing again. 

“What would you be, sap?” She asks the empty space where Kakashi was.

She flicks a rock into the air and watches it careen into the valley a hundred kilometers away. Aside from these falls, there’s nothing here. Dead land where Konoha once razed a people to the ground to gain 50 more kilometers of land. Uzushio’s only survivor is below, with seals of their people carved into their skin and their only remaining family the one they’ve found, right beside them. Filling this space with laughter instead of dead silence. 

Kakashi knows his history, just like they know his heart.

If Sakura is precarious organic cliffs made out of scarred bark, perching on the edge of drowning and thriving, well. Then, Kakashi is dirt fields empty of anything but daisy hope. Kakashi is arctic foxes giving birth to warmth and red mutations. Kakashi is the space in between Team 7’s outstretched fingers.

Kakashi is an asshole for making her run this drill over and over again. Next team dinner, she’s dousing him in spoiled soy sauce next as payback.

“Fucker,” she mutters, picking herself off the ground. Beginning to slither her way back down the falls, she listens for the sounds of her team over the roar of the water.

All of Sakura’s beloved people are places, maybe, she thinks as she climbs.

Yamato and Sai are knee deep brook crossings pushing can’t-stop inky seaweed to the back of her knees. Lee is skylights in telephone wire blankets swinging snowflake ornaments. Temari is burgeoning cool desert ponds tucked swirling in her cave system pockets. Team 10, Team Gai, Team 8, are globes of memories crowding, draping green snow peas over endless barbeque tables.

Sasuke and Naruto are home. Pillowcase creases, complicated, salt water gravity, intrinsic, tomato stains across knuckles, the deepest trench in the ocean with birds on the highest mountain, simple.

And Ino, Ino is harbor houses with flower strands in between the quick of fingers, gentle parts like curling Mother Nature’s hair around her pinky. Ino is promises and laugh lines.

Ino is 9 weeks gone on a solo T&I exchange she didn’t want, but Konoha wouldn’t refuse.

It’s been not even half the length written on the mission scroll that none of them are supposed to have read. Three weeks back from Suna and Sakura haunts the places Ino leaves behind, tipping over Choji and Shikamaru’s ghost lines.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Sakura says, Naruto’s admonishment coming out of her mouth.

Shikamaru winces, but not like he’s ashamed.

“Sorry,” Sakura says.

Not for the unsolicited opinion, but for the saying in Naruto’s vocal intonation and the reminding that she is part of a whole three at the moment, and Shikamaru is not.

Sakura misses Ino, but she isn’t _lost_. Choji didn’t even have on shoes last week. Shikamaru’s eyes are red, red. Team Asuma’d just come off a bad team S-rank, just come out of their joint hospital suite, when Ino was given the scroll. Sakura doesn’t have to know how much healing they’d gotten to do to know it wasn’t enough. Probably, there’s a comforting way to bring it up.

“Wanna get plastered?” Sakura asks instead.

“Fuck,” Shikamaru breathes out a heavy cloud of smoke, drops the cigarette and falls in beside Sakura, “Thought no one would ever ask.”

Sakura _tsks_ at him, “You can always count on me for recreational drugs.” She asks with hidden finger signs, for Urushi to be unseen, rather than quick, finding Choji to follow them. The dog huffs at her from the rooftop and goes.

They slide into Sakura’s dusty, tax-purpose-apartment, Sakura making a Choji-shaped hole in the wards subtly. Then, they bake truly gnarly brownies. Genuinely disgusting. Blackened and dry at the edges and goopey and blonde in the middle. But the weed (the strain that allows even Neji and Hinata to get high in the sky) proportion is right; Sakura is good at math.

“It is not my fault,” Sakura takes a deep breath around crumbs, “That I am terrible at cooking, though.”

“You’re the worst,” Shikamaru agrees.

“Thanks.” Another bite. “You’re pretty bad yourself.”

Shikamaru toasts her with a corner piece.

Four brownies in, Shikamaru’s eyes are red for a different reason. Both of their chakras are sluggish and out of sorts and the cloud of _missingangrylonging_ has drifted away on a steady blaze of nothing and no one. The present shifts colorfully in front of their fingers. Shikamaru’s movements have turned erratic, compromised.

She’s aware, from reports and from knowing Shikamaru, how compromised he actually is by all this, their lives, all of the tearing weight tagged to his ears; delicate splintering stakes, torn from his heavy roots.

_Doesn’t that bother you_, a tendril of regret curls from the back of Sakura’s mind. She lets the front of her mind stamp down on it. Who the fuck even gives a fuck. They’re entitled to a little mindlessness.

“Ah, wow,” Shikamaru says, intelligently, when she pulls out the peanut butter to slather on the next brownie.

“Yah,” Sakura agrees.

Two brownies later, Choji pops in between the apartment seals to knock on the door frame across from them.

_Oh,_ Sakura raises a peanut-y finger, _that’s who gives a fuck._

Choji and Shikamaru have a Couple Conversation with their eyes and a sad line of Shikamaru’s shoulders. Quiet sighs. Chin nods. Yearning tilts. Shikamaru takes Choji’s hand and lets himself be pulled upwards.

Finally.

“I have been _waiting_,” Sakura slaps a hand on the table a couple of times.

“Yeah, yeah,” Choji rolls her eyes, balancing Shikamaru’s weight across her back like an old backpack. Mumbling, Shikamaru rolls his forehead against the top of Choji’s spine. Ah. But. Mumbling’s private. She shouldn’t listen.

Humming, Sakura blots out the words into vague noises.

Finally, Choji nudges Shikamaru back with her head. The smile that curls over them both is sad but also, soft. Tender enough to make Sakura’s chest ache.

She clears her throat and sing-songs, “Take your love away,” waving her hand at them.

They roll their eyes at her and leave.

Her turn, she decides, to let go of the tension in her muscles and flop forward onto the table. Here’s good. She’ll just wait until someone comes to get her, now.

Sun shapes chase behind her eyelids, blobs, scrolls of secrets. The world is a bowl of old, old dango. The room is bright, blue. Her chakra is slathered all over it.

“Oops,” she giggles into the table and closes her eyes.

Sleep is heavy and comforting like a warm futon.

Sakura wakes to a stinging alert from her barrier wards. Someone is carefully peeling them back, tendril by familiar tendril. Gentle-like. Smiling, she noses into the safe corner of her elbow. After a minute, four hands tug her upwards gently.

“Hey,” she says, soft.

“What,” Sasuke says, “No sharing the goods?”

“Was for,” Sakura yawns big enough to crack her jaw, “Shika. Cause. Yunno.”

Because Ino, harbor homes and petal meadows. (Shikamaru, rain contoured buildings struck together with bamboo splints and high performance steel and Choji, a closet tavern usually nudging her elbow into the shimmering moonrise, are empty without Ino, are buildings left to the loneliness of recycled, waiting air.)

“We know,” Naruto says, sounding far too mopey, curling close.

Sakura pats their cheek gently. “Lemme sleep first and then we do something happy.”

Naruto smiles under her hand. Their voice is far too sly and peppy when they nudge a “_Sleeping_ _together_ could be happy,” at the shell of Sakura’s ear.

Giggling, Sakura pushes up from the table and lets herself drop into their waiting arms, “Naruuuto, don’t be so . . . single-minded,” she mumbles, because the joke never gets old.

A soft, fond snort from Sasuke. Bright and raucous contrast, Naruto laughs, swaying against her. “Ooh, Kurama’s offended.”

“Poor puddy-cat,” Sakura tries to say, but doesn’t quite manage before the tide of sleep rolls her over. Probably for the best.

Four days pass her by. No news about Ino, not that there's supposed to be any. She gets progressively more restless.

A couple of bandage-rip one day assignments are all she gets, all within Fire country. She grinds her molars handing in the pristine reports that any second year chuunin could do. One check-in with a subdued pile of Shikamaru and Choji later, Sakura taps out and Shino taps in with a rueful smile and a ladybug that kisses her bicep. Sakura cleans her tano collection, opens a book on eye degeration for doujutsu users, snaps it shut after a few minutes, paces. Sasuke and Naruto head out on a date, sometime after team training, without bothering to shower. Rolling her eyes in their stinky wake, Sakura shuts the front door firmly.

She’s relishes the silence of the house, takes a long bath, wraps her sore, bruised hands around her own body like its comfort. Half way through reading her next mission briefing file, she feels a pecking at the kitchen window ward. She closes her eyes and does the sign one handed, lazily sending her chakra out from the shape of the seal to curl around the bird bobbing back and forth impatiently on the sill.

It’s not a mission briefing summons, too gangly and its signature doesn’t taste like sulfur. Not one of Sasuke’s or Sai’s either, for sure, too small.

No, its chakra tastes metallic, clean, familiar. One of Tenten’s summons?

“Sorry, I don’t remember your name,” Sakura says, dripping water in the kitchen, a minute later, as she takes the tiny scroll from the summons’ beak.

“I don’t care, pinkypoo,” the bird says, rolling feathers in a wave like a shrug.

Definitely one of Tenten’s.

“Wonderful, then,” she tells it, cheerily and slams the window in its face.

It nearly snaps its beak jabbing trying to jab at the window in annoyance, slamming into the mold of the wards.

Sakura waves two fingers at it.

The scroll is short,

When you’re done antagonizing my summons, come over and watch porn with me

_Well,_ Sakura thinks, _with an invitation like that. _

She pops on ratty jonin pants she thinks once belonged to Naruto and a crop top she definitely stole from Sai. One bottle of Sasuke’s favorite sake from the cabinet tucked under her arm later, she’s on her way.

“Hey,” Tenten calls from the living room. “I’ve only got 5 hours before I depart.”

“I thought this was a social visit,” Sakura says, kicking her sandals off.

“It is,” Tenten says, “But it’s for a mission.”

“Ah,” Sakura says, holding back a too-dramatic sigh she knows she inherited from Yamato. Plonks the sake bottle onto her sandal instead and heads in.

Tenten’s curled up in the living room. Her mission hakama is already on, puffy with weapons. Her giant summoning scroll rests against the couch like a patient dog. Tenten’s apartment is always arranged just _so_. It makes Sakura a little self-conscious about their haphazard house. Neat and tidy and purposeful, is Tenten. On the coffee table is one of the small Intelligence TV’s, a video paused showing just an innocuous door in the still.

If a door in the context of a mission video has ever been innocuous.

“Mission porn?” Sakura asks.

“Lesbian porn,” Tenten half turns to her, grinning for just a second, “Part of the brief.”

Sakura chuckles and vows to think about this in Kakashi’s presence constantly over the next month. He’ll whine a storm wondering after her satisfied smirk.

“What, Hinata wasn’t available?” Sakura swings over the back of the couch and onto the squishy cushions. Though, she is a bit flattered someone came to her instead of Hinata, for lesbian porn.

“She’s in Lightning for 4 weeks,” Tenten shuffles her feet out of the way of Sakura’s, “Didn’t you see Akamaru’s message?”

Ah.

“Nope,” Sakura says, popping the syllables. “He’s not allowed by our house. The cats rile him up too much.” And Kurama, though Sakura tucks that under her tongue.

“Didn’t know that.”

“Mhm.”

Cause it’s not like they can bring it up much. _‘Hey guys, Konoha 12’s illegal and treasonous way of keeping each other in the loop about missions? It has an annoying loophole for Team 8 to Team 7.’_ Yeah, no. Can we design a better treason is a bit audacious, even for them.

Not all a shame though, Sakura thinks. With Ino and Hinata gone, she really is the resident gay gal guru. 

“Anyways,” Tenten’s voice is casual, “you’ve had a lot of sex. Sex not just with guys.”

Sakura’s laugh feels like a string of firecrackers. She thinks of the stretch of Ino’s scarred skin, of too many nameless women in too many countries with tiny mouthfuls of too small kindnesses, of Karin’s pitted lips bitten by too many people, the rough hip bones of a jonin from Kiri she never got the name of – yeah. Sakura’s never hidden that bit of herself. Almost likes daring Konoha to try and pry it out of her. Reckless.

“Yeah,” she says finally.

Here, Tenten hesitates for a second, staring at the screen. Sakura raises one eyebrow at her, waiting out the off-kilter silence.

“More recently than 3 years ago?”

_Ah_, Sakura thinks. 3 years ago, before Sakura and Sasuke and Naruto went public about them being together.

How much people actually know about the openness of their relationship is always something they’ve mutually said fuck it to, though. So –

“Well, Naruto’s also not a guy,” Sakura starts, voice cold with old frustration. “But – ”

“No, I know, Sakura,” Tenten flips the remote in her hand, emanating soothing chakra, “I’m not – I meant just. Girls specifically.”

“Girls with a vag, you mean.”

“I - yeah.”

“Right well,” Sakura shrugs, letting herself curl into the couch’s coolness, arms under her chin, against the armrest. “Yes, I have. More recently. Why?”

“I was wondering, because, I mean, if you would that is, I want to ask – Gods,” she exhales loud, mad. Shakes her head at her own self and Sakura covers her grin in her arms, “Fuck it,” Tenten hits fast forward and the video moves from the door quickly into some decent, stereotypical girl on girl action.

Sakura exhales and leaves the moment, lets her mind analyze at a distance.

Objective: catalog the build of the two women. Observation: younger woman, late 20s, dyed blue medium length hair, ambidextrous, controlled physical movements indicating taijutsu training. Older woman, 30s, brunet, naturally left handed, untrained, not more into the sex, but less able to hide it. Childhood bone fractures on both them. Objective: Location details. Observation: The room is rounded square clay – somewhere in Wind, the walls are red composite, the set is well used, shot in the afternoon. Three set workers in the scene at least. Video quality, handheld DLSR, nothing more, shaking at the corners when not wide angle – two lenses, one tripod.

5 minutes, 10, nothing seems strange.

“What am I -?” Sakura murmurs.

Tenten pauses the video on a close up of the younger woman’s face, and doesn’t say anything.

Doesn’t have to.

_Mission briefing porn. _

Sakura curls her tongue for a moment, looks between Tenten and the video. Analyzes.

The younger girl is dead. Or worse. Probably worse and Tenten is her replacement. Sakura resists the urge to close her eyes and just be _tired_ for an hour.

“Right,” she says, voice coming from a distance. “Okay.”

She details sex with women with a clit and a cunt, how to touch from the other side for Tenten, gives some history of her partners’ differences. Outlines what will be a giveaway, what she can play up to not get caught. Has Tenten replay the video several times to give specific pointers about what this girl likes and doesn’t. Resolutely doesn’t ask why Tenten didn’t ask for the reserve teacher on mission assignment to help with this.

Tenten asks academic questions, gets that it’s not that different, just bodies. She doesn’t need rudimentary help, that much’s obvious pretty quickly. Sakura could be at home lounging, instead of thinking about a sex worker and how she probably got brutalized and replaced like a bad kunai.

_Why did you really ask me here?_

Frustration begins to warm the back of Sakura’s mind, tetchy like rage but all the more listless.

“Tenten,” she says, quietly.

A jerking nod in acknowledgement.

The video fast forwards past the closeup now, through second orgasms, though positions changes, through restraints on the older woman’s arms, speeding through the way that her pleasure makes her face bright with eagerness. A rather large dildo, well enough lube though, Sakura approves. _Ah_ –

The woman slides gently into subspace under the trained performer’s hands.

Brown eyes wide and soft with lack of focus, safe in submission, fill the entire frame. The video pauses there.

“I don’t,” Tenten says, nodding to the screen. “Haven’t. Done that to anyone.” She sighs out, eyes closing just too long to be a blink, “I probably did like it. Or would have wanted to try. But I. Was still trying to figure out girls even, before I.”

Past tense, Sakura observes.

Before Tenten explored a private part of herself. Before now, when the system that likes to see them kill themselves for sport decided it didn’t matter. She won’t have a chance to figure it out now. It’ll be all different now. Associated with whatever this mission brings. And. Tenten’s too good a shinobi, a brawler, to be called in for anything not bloody.

_I mourn for the people we never got to become_, Sakura thinks at the side of Tenten’s serious face, rage coming up to choke her vocal chords. _I mourn because so many of us don’t even know to mourn. We don’t know enough about what we _don’t have_, to realize the weight of it beneath the dead godsdamned ground. _

She bites down on the thoughts. They won’t help.

_Focus, Sakura._

Tenten didn’t call her here for pity. She won’t accept that, Sakura knows. She’s genuinely asking for the mission, but.

“Do you,” she starts before she can think better of it.

Tenten’s switched out the remote for a juji shuriken without Sakura noticing, and she spins it now, small star raised like an eyebrow.

“If you wanted to,” Sakura’s pulse is loud in her ears, from rage, from nerves, “You could control your first time. With me.”

Silence slithers around the room for a full 10 seconds. The shuriken is frozen.

“What?” Tenten asks, finally, a bit breathy, “Do you mean?” Her eyes glance down Sakura’s ratty self like she can’t help, and Sakura would get prickly, except she knows, in the same way all the rookies know too much about one another - that Tenten likes her partners relaxed and natural. Sakura lounges further back into the couch so she can look more. “Sex?”

Her voice has fallen husky and Sakura likes it.

“Well, I mean that too. We can. But, when it’s not a guy, I like it, can go under even without sex,” _More often than not, she does_. Sakura forces herself to shrug, even as the flush starts to crawl in from behind her ears. “Could go under for you. Let you figure out if _you_ like control. Like that.”

Not as a tool of their village. But as a friend.

Tenten leans back on one elbow, other arm slung across her knee, still holding the shuriken so delicately. She’s casual competence, dizzying cords of muscle and soft gold sweater. Unfairly hot.

It’s not a hardship at all, to offer this.

“You’d like it if I pushed you around and we had sex,” Tenten says, eventually.

Orderly as ever.

“Dommed me during sex,” Sakura corrects, “If Naruto and Sasuke say its fine, course. Yeah.”

Tenten’s needlepoint eyebrows climb higher.

Silence for a long moment. The shuriken goes high and higher in the air, before stopping. Tenten reaches out one hand to Sakura’s arm. Her eyes flick between Sakura’s.

Finally, she speaks, quiet and blank, “You think it’d help with the assignment?”

Sakura jerks her arm away, bolting upright. Fury boils over her lips, “That wasn’t why I – don’t make it – _never_ _mind_.“ 

“Oh,” Tenten says, small.

“_Oh_,” Sakura snaps back, feeling so prickly her arms are tingling.

Tenten shakes her head, “No, wait, Sakura. I didn’t –”

Sakura starts to leave.

“Saku_ra_,” Tenten catches the tensing of her muscles, and drops the shuriken carelessly on the rug to reach out to her.

_That_ pulls Sakura to a halt.

The flush has crawled back over Tenten’s face, but her eyes are the same burning brown they are across battlefields, the same fervor of care she takes with blades and delicate wrist ligaments. Usually takes, when she isn't dropping them on the carpet to get Sakura's attention.

Sakura bites her lip.

“I,” Tenten starts again when it’s clear that Sakura isn’t running off, “just wasn’t sure what you were –”

“Propositioning you with?”

“Offering to me out of _obligation_.” Eyes narrowed, Tenten bites out the last word, snik-snak across the backs of her teeth.

Fuck.

“Fuck,” Sakura says. “Okay. That’s – yeah. Okay. I wasn't, at all.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sakura pushes her chakra away from her pressure points, lowers her blood pressure. “I know how it’s. How that is.”

“I know you do,” Tenten laughs and it only sounds harsh around the corners, just at the end of an exhale, almost imperceptible.

Sakura looks down at the shuriken still on the ground. “Then, what did you need me for, tonight?” Then, she winces, “Not that you can’t summons me whenever, but.”

“But why, yeah.”

Sakura watches Tenten watching nothing for a moment.

“I think,” Tenten laces her scarred fingers together, the knobby metal knuckle Sakura saw get crushed to dust when they were 14, jutting out abnormally. Tenten laughs a dry thing and looks up, brown eyes warm, “I just needed you to tell me I could, still. Can still.”

“Tenten,” Sakura pauses, “You really can,” she promises quietly and sits back down.

Another moment quaking between them. The TV display flickers a static in the well of their awareness. Outside, the moon has come out to play. It tricks light across the exploding tags folded into the grooves of Tenten’s windows, carries the stillness of night close. 

Finally, Tenten exhales. “Thanks Sakura.”

“Thanks Tenten.”

Tenten laughs.

Sakura kicks at her leg gently. “So. You don’t want to have sex – to scene with me, but you need me to tell you that you could.”

“Yeah,” she rolls her eyes, at the both of them, probably, kicks back lightly. “I think,” her leg thumps back into the couch. “I think I know who.” Tenten’s eyes slide down and right, memory access. Maybe thinking of something – someone in the Southeast of Konoha? Someone Tenten visits every Thursday, bright as the midmorning bell, chipper to pay exorbitantly for new blades when her old ones are still unwrapped in her cupboards?

“That weapons shop girl. In the Nara district, with the biceps?” Sakura guesses.

Tenten flushes. Yet again.

_My my,_ Sakura thinks, running her tongue over her teeth. How that would feel under her lips. The girl’s lucky.

“That obvious?”

“Nah,” Sakura slouches backwards, “Not to someone else. You’re good at playing the part. Eccentric weapons collector, whatever,” Sakura waves a hand, “It’s a solid cover.”

“You’d know all about eccentric weapons collectors, what with the original eccentric being on your team.” Tenten snorts and collects the shuriken off the floor, swiping it across her hakama in her usual flick-swish method.

Sakura cackles, “Yeah, he’s fucking awful.”

Tenten’s cheeks are still painted pink. Sakura admires the surprising rose of her skin, the tilted smile Tenten’s giving to her own self.

The silence sits between them for one final time.

“I think,” Tenten starts, pauses to wrap her hands around her scroll, before pulling it slowly off her shoulder, “I want to do it however it goes. With her.”

Now, it’s Sakura’s turn to smile at Tenten.

She doesn’t wish her luck, because she knows that’s not how Tenten operates, but she wishes her the best, wishes for just the smallest sliver of kindness to contain the strongest steel of consent. Wishes Tenten wasn’t making a choice out of not having a choice.

This ought to be something fun and lighthearted. A discovery where no comfort is needed to take it, because it is, itself, a comfort. Instead of what it is. What they all are. 

Sakura’s distracted coming home across the rooftops, already has the front door closed and warded, by the time she realizes there are two very familiar signatures already there.

Staring at her from around the corner of the hallway, actually.

“I,” her voice croaks out, “I thought you were gone all evening.”

“Yeah, we –“

“Naruto found a new anmitsu place in the garden district, but the proprietor is that blabby guy –”

“Took us 40 minutes just to _order_ –” Naruto pulls at their own face.

“The one with fishbreath you can’t stand.” Sasuke finishes, elbowing Naruto’s side, “But we knew you’d want to try anyway, so we came right back,” Sasuke rolls his eyes, but not like he’s bothered at all. 

In fact, both of them have wet hair and dewy skin. Naruto’s day bangle earrings have changed to night studs and Sasuke’s hands are freshly healed pink. Like Sakura, they’re both dressed in a strange comfortable blend of all of Team 7’s wardrobe. Sai’s shorts with _dumplin’_ printed on them stretch across Naruto’s lovely ass, a threadbare tee Sakura inherited from her father drowning Naruto’s shoulders. One of Kakashi’s masks is holding back Sasuke’s most unruly curls and Naruto’s tank top they’d accidently dyed deep purple shows off Sasuke’s tattoo’s, his scars and burns and stabs all easily on display.

Sakura stares at them.

“Saku? You okay?” Naruto takes a few paces towards her.

“Yeah, I just,” _learned another horrible thing about someone we care about_, “was giving a consult to Tenten about an assignment.” She pauses, tries to let out some of her strange tension with an exhaling laugh. “Offered to have sex with her, actually.”

“Oh,” Naruto says, small moue of slight confusion, “Was it okay?”

“No, yeah, we, uh, didn’t.” She breathes deep, gets the scent of Sasuke’s weird lemongrass hand lotion, the warmth of Naruto’s skin, the sweet rice wafting from the kitchen. “Wouldn’t have, without asking you two. Duh.” She swallows, “You – you really brought me anmitsu all the way from the garden district.”

“You’ve been stressed. Unfocused.” Pointed glance to her tousled berry hair and dangerously unarmed arms. “So.”

“We thought you could use some,” Naruto pauses just a bit, “_good things_ to focus on.”

Ah.

The softness bared skin of them clicks. The waiting of them, the tilt of Naruto’s hip and slant of Sasuke’s collar that draws her eye – begs her hands on them. Bright blue-purple eyes and purple-black eyes on hers. Asking, offering.

_Whatever they tried to wring out of Team 7, they didn’t get this part of us_, Sakura thinks.

Triumph races through her, tsunami bold.

It’s terrible, the choice Tenten is making out of no choice, but that’s _not them_. Konoha was never why the three of them had become the three of them; was never why they’d had sex in the first place.

What they are together is so wholly their own.

And what that moment was, was sex, but also it was Sasuke’s first soft kiss and Sakura’s two first loves and Naruto’s first everything. What they are now, is everything they were, transfigured then. Right at the apex of them becoming people instead of terrifying children, they learned the stunning, electrifying shapes that their three bad-luck-bent bodies and pillow-whispered words made together. Sex then had made them really be _together_.

The first time, Sakura thinks, looking over her teammates, tongue rolling against her teeth – the first time they’d had sex like breaking through the top layer of the atmosphere and breathing in the starry void.

Unlike now, when Sakura watches the curve of Sasuke’s thigh switch under her gaze and knows he’s resisting pressing them together, unlike watching Naruto fidget and smooth sweet fingers over their clothes and knowing cocksure in her body what their bodies want, what they want –

Then, they’d known absolutely nothing about the galaxies inside their own selves and the sheer vaulting intimacy of it – the way that humans could be together naked, devastatingly revealed and needy, made them shaky, made them gasp into sweaty skin, chakra points wet and burning loose, sloppy hands forming accidental jutsu and snorting laughter. They were too young to be what they were being burned into. But it didn’t matter. They were _burning_ and they’d _needed_ _it_. Oak-sure in Sakura’s bones, she knows this. They’d needed each other. Needed something, some stretch of the endless sky across mussed pillows to be theirs. Needed some small moments to be good and kind and take root in their bodies like mountains blending into the clouds. Needed to take in each other, sex as the route for their survival. And then, they’d grown beyond need, somehow. Tripped into want. Took in each other in more than just bodies. Held close each others’ hopes, trust, wishes, hears. It molted the steel in their spines with carbon, diamond sharp and brilliant.

Sakura’s always been dramatic and she doesn’t care. Sex changed them from something volatile and quick to bite at their own bloody chained wrists, into a visceral warmth they could hold hands through.

The sticky, starchy, utterly vital way they’d mish-mashed together, again and again those first couple of weeks, sprung sparking aches across Sakura’s whole body in places that she still presses on today. She took that then, took that with them, _took them_ and then gave herself, joyously, fervently. It was an act of trust greater than turning her back to them in a fight, greater than signing away her unknown adult life, entering the academy at 10. It was a declaration, so much more than any of their shouting and pushing ever was.

And now.

Now, Naruto and Sasuke brought her back dessert they will lick from her sticky lips and they readied their bodies for her eager hands and they _want_ her – all of her.

Now, sex is communication, affirmation, laughter, snippy and prickly, casual and mindblowing. An evolution that becomes and undoes.

Now, she wants them.

They’re her idiots, her teammates, her home plates, her northern stars, her fucking choice, hers. She relishes that, sips it back on her tongue. Swallows down a dose as often as her mangled mind and body let her.

Sakura and Naruto stare at each other in the hallway of their simple, fought-for house and Sasuke stares at them staring. They are bodies aligned into a home.

Today, what they do here is theirs alone. 

She drops the sake and intercepts.

“Sakura –“ Naruto starts, as she’s grabbing onto them, hoisting them up. Sakura pushes Naruto up against the wall, hands under their bare, vulnerable knees and Naruto goes, easy as churned butter, arms draping over Sakura’s muscle-bunched shoulders. A long sensual exhale follows. An echo follows, from Sasuke.

They’re fucking right here, she decides. Agrees with them. Communicates _fuck yes_ back to them, her beautiful, attentive, waiting lovers.

“Wanna get you wet,” Sakura says, leaning in, crushing close, against the underside of Naruto’s jaw.

Naruto’s body tenses, releases, tenses, and releases too fast for Sakura to manage to get down in between their legs so she can feel that strength around her ears, discover what body Naruto is in today and love it all the same.

“Think,” Naruto laughs breathlessly, “that kunai’s flown by already.”

“What,” Sasuke says, suddenly right beside them, leaning into Naruto’s other ear, arm bracketing them. “You wouldn’t enjoy Sakura _sticking the point in_ even further?” His hand presses to Sakura’s lower back, just barely at the line of her pants. Searing. Absolutely a-purpose.

This time Naruto exhales a groan and drops their head back into the wall. They’re shaking, Sakura can feel it all around her like a tsunami.

“Let me fuck you, sweetheart?” Sakura asks, kissing 20 kisses up to Naruto’s dewy temple just because she can.

Because they all want it.

And Naruto, who can give the most straight-laced shinobi field-sex-ed out of anyone even before the spymastering, with Iruka for a Dad, with Kakashi for a teacher and all the things Kurama has seen and done in their head – blushes like a bursting sunset.

Bold torii red painted across their strong forest brown cheekbones, framing their open arching lips.

The sight never gets old.

_We were too young,_ Sakura thinks, loud and hot, _we clung too hard to each other because we had no other options, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t choose each other. That we don’t still. We survive only at each other’s throats._ She is so angry, so glad –

Naruto is so beautiful like this.

Beside her, Sasuke makes a quiet sound of desperation as Sakura kisses right over Naruto’s blush, loving the heat, loving Naruto loving them. Turning, she catches Sasuke’s lips as well, heady rush of power bouncing back and forth between them. The taste of him is delicious, fresh baked katon takoyaki, with a dash of the anmitsu. She wants to do sweet, slick, dangerous things to the both of them. Wants to bury them in her ribs and melt them into her veins and wants Sasuke to be loud because he’s so overwhelmed by how _good_ it feels and wants Naruto to feel so safe they sob and wants them both to fuck her and hold her and fall into her and never, never let go. 

“Please,” Naruto begs for them, so sweetly compromised.

It always riles them up to see Sakura and Sasuke together.

“Hands up,” Sasuke says, hoarse.

“Sasu –“

“Up,” Sakura orders.

Naruto’s pupils blow wide as their hands wiggle their way up the wall. Sasuke presses his chakra-blue palm down on them, pushing Naruto hard into the wall. The conflagrant force of their combined chakra spreads familiar cracks outwards in the plaster almost instantly. The sight alone makes Sakura’s chakra coils burn open. Turning into Sakura, Sasuke bites down on the top of her ear, holds it.

Now, it’s her making a desperate noise.

She shakes against them and feels the earth echo her, chakra messy and itches to be put to use.

Sasuke releases her, “All yours,” and sidles against Naruto’s side on the wall, hands alighting with more and more chakra layers to pin Naruto as they can’t help struggling in want, turning like a flower in need to the boiling sun of Sasuke’s body.

Sasuke’s so gorgeously flushed, back of his neck that blood-warm that always calls to Sakura’s lips. The salt savory memory-taste of him under the bite of Sakura’s teeth twists visceral in her gut. After they have Naruto like this, she’s gonna get Sasuke between Naruto and her, too. The pull of them two is always magnetic and Sakura has absolutely no problems being the binding metal drawn tense between, and swinging hot around them. 

“Damn right,” Sakura manages finally, hardly recognizing her own voice.

She hands over Naruto’s left leg to Sasuke’s free hand, his delicious firm grip. A gasp, then Naruto closes their eyes and just, gives into it, liquid yearning in both of their steel arms. Spread open and trusting. Butter toasted sweet. Lust slices down Sakura’s stomach as Sasuke latches his mouth onto Naruto’s damp shoulder, eyes slit red, like he just can’t help himself.

_Watch us,_ Sakura says, soundless, to him.

He shudders for her and his tomoe spin faster.

Finally, fucking finally, Sakura gets to drop down on her scarred knees, pull her own shorts off Naruto’s body, and press her mouth to the bruise-tender heat of Naruto.

“Sakura –“ they cry out together.

Finally, she gets to listen to the babbling, feel the clutch of well worked muscles under her gentle teeth, the trust placed on her tongue.

Then, Sakura gets to slide one hand down her pants, coat her hand in her own slick and trail it up again inside Sasuke’s thigh, grab hold of him hot and wet and just as firm as he won’t say he likes it right out of the box and make them both _scream_.

She feels so fucking powerful when they give themselves to her.

She feels so fucking cared for when they turn to her, after, and ask for her to give herself back.

They do, in fact, lick the taste of sweet rice right off her lips and she appreciates, Naruto at her back with their fingers gone to careful raking claws and Sasuke under her spasming thighs, the way she herself tastes on their lips.

When they fall onto each other in bed an hour and a half later, gasping for breath the way training can’t even make them do sometimes – Sakura lets thinking return, slow as winter thaw, to her fucked out brain. How warm it is here. Thread of chakra, Naruto’s, turns into a clone to turn on the fan overhead. Dissipates with their soft sighs. The cool breeze. The look on Tenten’s face. The shaky uncertainty of her decision. So different, Sakura thinks. Twitching legs over her lovers’. So different from this shaking. But Tenten’s shaking. She licks her teeth. That’s familiar, too. Her first solo A mission, first 6 month undercover liar’s place, first time choosing death for someone she was pretending to be in love with as a cover. Far too familiar, and without this?

Without this to remind her of the difference? To remind her to be human? Who knows –

What would she not know she didn’t know?

She mourns parts of herself, sure. But, she clenches her fingers in the sheets, breaths out slowly. _But_ – only because they’ve taught her about the joy of the space in between where and what she is and who and why she could be.

“I love you,” Sakura says to both of them, “I love what we do together.”

_Love us together. _

“No shit,” Naruto says, hand over Sakura’s heart, medic hands listening to her heavy pulse.

She goes to pinch the back of their palm and finds Sasuke’s hand already there. _Alright_, she thinks butterfly box secret, _maybe we’re gonna be alright. _

_Maybe, _she yawns to mess of their weapon-lined pillows,_ we already are. _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof! got delayed on posting this by some family and professional stuff. thanks for the patience. here's a massively long field scene that got wildly out of hand but i swear is relevant, lol. enjoy!

The calm lasts just two days.

Saturday, instead of heading on their usual Konoha 12 BBQ night, Team 7 gets a mission scroll to deal with a suspected lower yokai just North of Tea Country. Sai grumbles about pork as they slink through swaying pine trees up the island’s mountains. Kakashi’s taken a solo mission to mope about Gai being on an extended mission in Ice Country, so it’s Yamato and Sai and them.

Well, all them and the yokai who’s been pulled into the wrong reality and is currently waging a war against the cliff sides of the small island, dropping tons of rocks into the ocean with almighty splashes, tinged in angry, bright yellow chakra. Swaying over the tops of the trees, it’s large, but not near as large as even a first level bijū. Their semi-solid chakra form has tentacles and a vaguely ermine head, attached together with a body that has too many stark rib bones to make anatomical sense.

15 hours ago, the yokai showed up like it was water wrung out of a tea towel into the ocean. It’s just a bit of a disruption to peaceful, tiny Tea.

In her pine perch, a kilometer away, Sakura focuses on her breathing, on keeping downwind. Beside her, is the dark patch of Sai and Sasuke, both of them sharpening blades, as they wait.

Below, Naruto weaves their way through crushed underbrush, directly towards the thrashing yokai.

“At least,” Sasuke breathes, somewhere to her left, “There’s no stupid shinobi to get in our way, this time.”

Sai laughs lightly, “Praise Tea for knowing better than to have their own nin, just to save us any inconvenience.”

“Don’t curse us,” Yamato orders, from below them.

Sasuke huffs audibly.

“Yeah,” Sakura agrees, eyes on Naruto now just a few meters from breaking through the last of the tree cover, “Maybe they’ve hired a unit from Sawa, again.”

“Don’t _curse_ us,” Yamato repeats.

A small round of giggles passes through them.

Naruto’s chakra signature, muted until now – pressed down almost to the flat of the earth – blooms slowly. It curls around them, a bubble of soft red. Ears and two tails form, the same semi-solid chakra as the yokai, waving gently._ Look_, they seems to say, _I’m one of you, you’re not alone._ Pressure in the atmosphere shifts, popping Sakura’s ears, as Naruto pulls on the wind to carry their scent up the plains in advance. Sakura rotates her jaw, and Naruto steps forward slowly. 

The yokai doesn’t even glance their way. It stays, pummeling the rock faces, occasionally letting out a rumble that vibrates the trees.

Naruto drops to a crouch, tails twitching. 200 meters away from the yokai, and nothing. No response. Kurama and Naruto usually just jump head first into yokai and bijū. Sakura shifts, digging her heels into the branches. Something’s wrong. Naruto’s peels off more of their chakra suppression, bumping their chakra signature up to roughly average nin level.

The yokai slaps water against the rock so hard it rushes back to hit them in the face. They make a strange sound, body twisting, tentacles slamming against the ground.

Then, they do it again.

Still, they won’t turn toward Naruto.

For 4 minutes, Naruto tries like that, knees pressed to the soggy grass, more and more chakra eking into the air. The set of their shoulders growing gradually tenser.

Sasuke mumbles a curse into the still air. Sakura kicks vaguely in his direction.

Finally, Naruto slumps down, and the chakra fades back to Naruto’s normal mission level, a low blip continuously redirected into wind-form chakra, dissipating on the breeze, recognizable only to the team because they know what to look for.

Naruto turns around, hands up in the air, and signs: _Advance. I._

“Oh,” Sai says, quietly hesitant. “First pick is me,” and flits down to Naruto’s side, liquid smooth.

One day, Sakura thinks, they’re gonna finally convince Sai to not be so surprised by their trust, to fully believe, bone and break, that Team 7 is always gonna choose them.

The yokai stops lashing at the cliffs for a moment, to breathe heavily, their sides shaking. Chakra is sloughing off them in messy layers, uncontained. Where it settles, it transforms in globs into dirty water, turning the mountain grassland to swamp. The rate of loss is accelerating. Sakura’s mouth twists.

Naruto and Sai are gesturing a bit, back and forth. Sai pulls out their ink brush and draws a quick lash, chakra slinking across the land towards the yokai. It halts, just at the edge of the yellow pools of mud, flexing for a moment, in sync with the muscles of Sai’s back. Sai shakes their head. The ink skitters back to Sai’s hands, mouse-like. Naruto’s shoulders tense again.

They flit back through the underbrush together. Sakura and Sasuke join Yamato on the lower canopy level to meet them.

“Report,” Yamato says, when Sai and Naruto alight on the branches opposite of them.

“I think,” Naruto stares at the yokai, “That they’re injured. Something about the summoning seal was wrong? Maybe? It could have damaged them. Look at their chakra loss coming off them, like a, almost like a . . . prolonged aneurysm.”

“Shit,” Sakura says, elegantly. “So, the slapback it keeps doing; no pain recognition.”

“Yeah,” Naruto rubs their arm, right where Sakura knows the dragon seal is stamped on their forearm.

“What does that mean for us, Naruto?”

“Well, Kurama doesn’t recognize them.”

“_Well_, if _Kurama_ doesn’t.” Sasuke puts in, with that belligerent tone he reserves specifically for Kurama.

Yamato rolls her eyes, “Hardly unusual, Naruto. Kurama is a dominion above even the highest bijū.”

“Stuck-up old codger,” Sasuke says.

Sakura rolls her eyes this time.

“Hey,” Naruto says, but it’s a token objection. They’re watching the yokai, still. “Yeah, but, that means I don’t have a way to talk to them. Kurama tried directly, too. Says their chakra reacted like –“ Naruto cuts off, wincing.

“Like a dumb, unevolved human’s!” Sai says, bright and morbidly serious.

“Well,” Naruto says again, shoulder shrugging with a ‘_what can you do, my Kyuubi body-partner is a thousands of years old being, with near indescribable power, mild immortality and an ego to match_’ sort of resignation.

Old news.

Sakura crouches down low and braces her forearms across her knees. The yokai is rumbling louder now.

“We have 3 hours before our first check-in is due,” Yamato says, glances up at the sun through the branches, “We can either attempt seal correction –“

“There’s no containment seal, no binding tag.” Naruto shakes their head, mouth twisted. “No trace chakra, either.”

“Confirmed,” Sasuke says, eyes flickering red as he glances over at the yokai and the swamp lands.

“So someone just summoned and ran?” Sakura leans her head back against the tree trunk. “What a one-night stand.”

Sai grins over at her. She sticks her tongue out back at them.

“Or we can contain and retrieve,” Yamato finishes, looking long-suffering.

“Easy peasy,” Sakura stretching out her arms over her head.

“The chakra isn’t neutral,” Naruto’s voice is rough. Upset. Rightfully so. Sakura sucks on her teeth. She’d be incensed just if someone pulled a Konoha genin into a different world, let alone pulled them into a different world, left half their head behind and then left them to kill themselves, or be killed.

“I can’t attach any ink to the yokai. Too much chakra,” Sai says, voice flipping to mission empty. “It’s acidic, eats at any direct or solid substance.”

“Fūinjutsu?”

Naruto and Sai share a glance.

“I still have to touch the target with the ink,” Sai says, still looking at Naruto, offering a shrug.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Naruto says, shaking their head. “They’ve got weird –“

A twig snaps behind Sakura and the yokai is on top of them.

“Fuck!” Sasuke hisses, half a second before the tree branch beneath him disintegrates in a splash of yellow chakra.

They all lunge away.

Sakura skips north, one handing her earth seals to block any chakra from following her, ringing around the yokai. She stops, tucked behind a giant pine, upwind and uphill, clocking Sai and Sasuke fanning out east to draw the yokai’s attention away from Naruto and Yamato, who’ve got their heads together.

Sai sets off a flash bang in front of the yokai. They rear back, snarling, spewing chakra. Cranky as an ocean volcano.

Sakura narrows her eyes at the yokai. It got over half a kilometer, without any of them noticing. She turns the shape of the yokai’s chakra diffusion over in her mind, even as she’s palming chakra to slam her fist into the rock face beside her. _Something is weird here_, she thinks, clawing out a yawning scar in the earth to entrench the yokai against the tree line. Sasuke passes her a barrier tag on his flickering way around the clearing. She slaps it in between two boulders, activating it with a quick burst.

_Clear_, she signs to Sai when they glance over.

Sasuke slides into Sai’s place, daishō blades out, already red with chakra. The yokai rears and Sasuke slices, pushing fire chakra in a wave across theirs. The air screeches to steam.

To Sakura’s left, Sai flicks the last ink marks of the connection seal. A field barrier pops into existence, bright white around them. 1 kilometer of land and them, locked in with the yokai.

Naruto and Kurama’s combined chakra spills across the bubble in a wave to meet the yokai’s. It twists into the grooves left by Sasuke’s blade and Sakura’s earth jutsu, latches onto the yellow chakra with a gritted grunt of pain from Naruto. Naruto’s hands are blurring through seals, trying to find an attachment point, like Kurama usually uses to subdue lower level yokai.

Yellow splotches of the ground boil under the yokai’s feet, rolling with tree roots, trying to burst through. Sakura slides down behind the rock pile as Sai distracts the yokai from trying to flop half its tentacles on Sasuke. Pressing her hands to the earth, Sakura offers her chakra to Yamato’s, to the mokuton roots battling the swamp surface.

“Ugh.”

The jutsu is unwieldy, twisting away from her carefully split and reintegrated chakra. Usually, her and Yamato are nearly the same frequency, same nature affiliations, same stubborn twisting chakra working tenacious underground through mokuton or not. Today though, the combination jutsu sticks at her as she maneuvers through the yokai’s chakra. Focus tacky with biting pain, her fingers start to go numb.

Above her, the air pressure shifts again. Naruto’s voice is distant, but clear, “Immobile in 2.”

2 minutes. Great.

She grits her teeth and presses harder. The ground craters around her, slopping mud up her sleeves.

“That good, huh?” Sasuke asks, from beside her.

“Something’s up with this fucking chakra.”

_Maybe she can level it by evaporating off the excess water?_

“No shit,” Sasuke says.

She kicks out at him. Shoving the water into air and the rocks out of the way underground, she brute-forces a path for Yamato towards her and Sasuke. North West. The ground trembles in her wake.

“Losing ground integrity,” she says, loud enough for all of them to catch. The entire containment bubble is a hot spot, primed with pressure.

“14 degrees West,” Sasuke murmurs, eyes spinning, flicking between the ground and the yokai.

Sakura adjusts. A quick snake seal to adjust the water ratio in the mud _again_ and she’s pulling the jutsu into Sasuke’s line of coverage. His quick fingers sneak in between the dirt-caked layers of her left sleeve and her armor, catching on the tagging kunai. He slings them across the yokai, sloshing into the mud at its feet where the roots can’t seem to stay grown.

_Nitric acidity for sure_, Sakura thinks.

Sai jumps back from distracting with flashbangs, meeting up with Naruto at the South end of the barrier.

Yamato shoves forward with as much force as she and Sakura can muster.

Naruto pulls the oxygen from the air around the yokai and in one fell swoop, replaces it all with Kurama’s chakra. The bold red vortex churns around the yokai, smothers out the yellow sludge. Pressing down, down, achingly heavy, it lowers into the yokai’s twisting spine. Captures it in a whirling coat.

In the eye of the storm, held by the immense chakra pressure, the yokai pauses for half a second. Still and immobile.

Then, their chakra explodes outwards.

It obliterates Naruto’s hold. Burns through mokuton.

Pure yellow, white flash –

“Fuck!”

Sakura’s blind, light dancing in front of her eyes, afterimages of the chakra bursting around other chakra shapes. She shoves up the rock she’s still got within her jutsu, caging in Sasuke and her from where the yokai should still be. Beside her, there’s a tiny pained sound. It grates, horrible and familiar on her ears.

“Sasuke?”

“_Shit_.”

Another layer of rock over them, dog hand seal to flash cool the mud into dirt, she slides around in front Sasuke. He’s still facing towards the yokai. Still looking where Naruto is wading through the yellow chakra star, alight with blue healing, skin burning off and regenerating back in equal rates, trying to contain the chaos. Yamato is behind them, holding the ground steady, straining with effort. Sakura pulls her eyes away from it, blinks giant spots.

Sasuke’s eyes are clenched shut. “Shit,” he says again.

“Naru –“

“No,” Sasuke shakes his head, “’m fine.”

“Bullshit, you fuck.”

The corners of Sasuke’s mouth turn up and his eyes blink open. Black-purple irises, tiny, pinpoint pupil, whites nearly red with veins, not bleeding, but – Sakura taps a finger to his throat to check his pulse, clocks the sluggishness of his chakra pathways, blown wide open but clogged somehow, like synapses firings gone unused -

“Shit.” Shitty fucking exploding yokai. _Sakura’s_ still got chakra shapes playing at her peripherals. And she was looking away without a doūjutsu on.

“Yes,” Sasuke says, curt.

She runs her fingers through a basic healing carefully, taps Sasuke’s supraorbital bones and directs just a small among of chakra down the overexerted blood vessels. It’s precarious work, the both of them frozen still except for the sickly-familiar movement of Sakura’s chakra through Sasuke’s body. This is much more Naruto’s thing, she thinks bitterly, trying to get at a stubborn block in Sasuke’s left retina, the scaring in his bloodvessels that she’s never good at healing clean.

“Leave it,” Sasuke pushes on her hands gently.

“Naruto’ll have my head.”

“Then they can correct it later.”

“Fine,” Sakura stands and turns to slam her fist down into the ground, opening up a 40 meter fissure that the yokai’s left side collapses into. “It’s later. Naruto,” she calls, hooking a thumb over her shoulder at Sasuke.

They glance up from trying to smush the yokai against the fissure and then fall back to let Sai take over with a giant inky bear summons. Naruto runs towards them, around the edge of the bubble.

Sasuke kicks at Sakura’s shin, but doesn’t get up. She kicks back and stomps off to take Sai’s place on point.

Naruto murmurs to Sasuke behind her and she slips into the routine of fighting.

Wakizashi up, flaring chakra across the blade, meeting acid with cool, crisp water. An explosion tag 5 meters from the yokai’s snout, pushing it into Yamato’s waiting wooden hands. Punching on where there should be pressure points and finding nothing but gelatinous innards that try sucking her arm all the way in.

The yokai grumbles and rumbles and shrugs it all off.

Taijutsu attacks are ineffective.

_Poison_, she analyzes, covering Sai as they touch up the barrier tags, _use the acid’s vessel system to your advantage. Take the direct route. Injection. Non-nitrate compound. Estimated kill time, 3 minutes. _

_No_, she reminds herself, shaking her head to clear it, _non-lethal containment. The yokai didn’t ask for this. Unwilling victim. Non-lethal. Naruto needs to save them._ _Estimated save time, unknown._

Sasuke and Naruto rejoin the fight, both testy. Neither of their eyes are red.

They try letting Yamato trap the yokai against the fissure, roots ripping 45 degrees across the land. The chakra pools in the fissure around the yokai, eating away at the mokuton’s gripping phalanges with cracking pops, disintegrating faster than Yamato can regenerate them.

They try egg formation, cocooning the yokai in their combined chakras in a lattice of barrier tag threads. The yokai shifts and struggles, quiets, and then their chakra turns inwards to burn the seals of their own body. The yokai burns, heals, burns, cracks through the shackles and then bellows its own hurt.

They try pinning it against the field. Their chakra starts to eat away at the surface of Sai’s chakra. “What the fuck,” Sai mumbles, is echoed by the rest of them, when the yokai slams a sludgy wave against the barrier, repeatedly letting the rebound hit themselves in the face, breaking open wounds that instantly close up.

_What a pitiful creature._ Sakura’s heart twists.

They move the yokai away from the barrier to try and stop them hurting themselves.

23 minutes into playing cat and mouse with the yokai, trying not to hurt it, a tentacle breaks free of the hold of the tree roots Yamato has been looping around them. It doubles, triples, in size, pushes its surrounding chakra out unexpectedly before lashing around towards Sai. They dodge the first whip, but then the tentacle twists, flexes through space impossibly somehow like a jikūkan jutsu.

Sakura’s stomach plunges. She lunges for the yokai’s head –

The tentacle slams into Sai’s torso. They cry a muffled shout of pain, dropping down. The tentacle wraps around their ribs. Acidic chakra burbles up around their stomach, dripping onto the ground. Sasuke’s there the next second, cutting at the tentacle with fire chakra, face furious, but eyes still locked black. Naruto snags Sai and hauls them aside.

The chakra around the yokai becomes unpredictable, exponentially growing only to sink, fat and heavy, into the ground. Sakura’s fingers blister even as she limited herself to distance jutsu and kenjutsu. She narrowly avoids twisting her ankles in the quicksand chakra underfoot.

They’ve all collected little wounds on top of little wounds, stinging acidic distractions.

“Never seen this in a lower yokai,” Yamato says from their crouch on the ground, nestled in tree limbs. Her voice is mild. Pointed. Looking first at Sakura, her eyes then flicker over at Naruto, curled over Sai’s body, still. Chakra rings them both, glowing healing covering Naruto’s hands and over half of Sai’s torso.

“No,” Sakura says, shortly. “We haven’t.

Yamato’s right, they need to stop playing this game.

The yokai rumbles, unleashing a volley of sludgy acid. Sasuke pulls its attention toward the tree-line and Sakura and Yamato come at it from the flank, fending through a nest of tentacles – _are there _more_ of them?_ – to try and lay restraints on its legs.

Head lashing, the yokai slams themselves into the earth, trying to avoid their jutsu. Cries out again in pain.

Sakura closes her eyes for a second, before launching to stop the maws of the yokai from closing on Sasuke.

Naruto leaves Sai behind the rock outcropping Sakura pulled up before – letting them just focus on maintaining the field barrier. They return to the fight erratic. Too fast to follow almost, they flit back-and-forth, a touch to heal someone’s burned arm here, an attempt at a dragon seal there, another too weak punch to a single tentacle. Not in formation, not abiding even Uzumaki-branded medic code. 10, tense, progressively acidic minutes later, Sasuke taps Sakura on the wrist. Her mouth twists.

“Yeah,” she agrees. A glance at Sasuke’s eyes, which are _still_ black, fuck. His arms are covered in burns and snags. “I’ll do it.”

He shrugs, agreeing, even as the skin around his eyes tightens with frustration. Leaving her with a touch to the small of her back, he lunges to block the tentacles from where Sai is.

Sakura drags Naruto behind one of Yamato’s messy piles of calcified tree trunks. 

“Naruto.”

“Sakura, I know, but we have to –”

“Sasuke’s disarmed and Sai is 3 minutes from losing the barrier,” she snaps at them, regrets the anger even as she’s wielding it.

They stare at each other for too-long a moment. Her anger, her frustration over this, twisting against their stubbornness, their good, confused heart.

“Hi,” Yamato says blandly from their left, dispatching three wave attacks at once. Sakura parries the tentacle that follows with a backhanded swipe of her blade. “Team leader here. Can we –”

Sakura cuts half a glare across her wakizashi, “90 seconds. I’ll come in from the left flank under your cover and inject tetro into the left external carotid. Give us air, fussy-Yama.”

Yamato mutters something that sounds a lot like “You’ve both got a fat load of hot air,” as she drops into the sludgy swamp grounds to avoid the yokai’s snout, but there’s a thread of relief in it. Too long, they waited.

“Naruto,” Sakura tries, reigning her voice softer, “You can’t save them.”

“I can, I can,” Naruto’s hands are flipping through seals like a back alley dealer, searching trick after trick.

“You don’t know this one,” Sakura reaches out a hand to hover over their forearm.

It’s a metaphor and not.

“But –”

“Naruto. I’m sorry.”

Naruto’s eyes shut, tears pushing down their face. Their head jerks in half a nod, half a denial, and Sakura clamps her hand over Naruto’s arm, pulls down so they stop trying to form seals. Cups their scuffed, beautiful, healer’s hands.

“I’ll do it,” she says, “Let me do it.”

_Let me keep protect you from doing this. _

Naruto doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move. Their muscles quake. Behind Sakura, Yamato makes a cut off sound, followed by a flare of chakra from Sasuke. She leaves Naruto there, belly-stuck with the blade of their own sorrow.

“Yamato,” Sakura says, as she steps away.

For all that trying to save the yokai has taken 80 minutes, killing it takes just over 2 minutes.

Sakura kills them kindly, while Yamato holds them still as she can. A shot of tetra and a needle of chakra following along the injection point to slam it into their chakra system. One fell stroke. The yokai crumples with a soft sound. Chakra slides off them. It’s still bright yellow, but finally smoky, instead of viscous. It fades gently, like a longing, deep into the earth. Sakura steps back and resists the urge to rub at her hand. The backlash from cutting inside the chakra system reverberates all the way down to her elbow.

“Clear,” Yamato says.

Dead.

For once, Sakura looks down at one of her corpses and doesn’t feel angry or frustrated or hollow. She just feels tired.

_Kill estimate accurate, _her report will read.

Team 7 stands there in the too-quiet of post-battle. Finally, Yamato swipes her right palm down her left, flat in front of her. They move as one to clear the scene. Sakura puts her rock barriers back in the earth. Trees are told to get back in their niches, water turned towards the ocean, air pressure leveled out. 1 minute, 3, 6. They clear the scene and still, the yokai’s corpse doesn’t dissipate from the center of the swamp-field. Doesn’t return to its own dimension.

“Tha’s weird,” Sasuke mutters, eyes squinted, leaning on Kusanagi. She doesn’t remember when he summoned it. Not a great sign.

“This whole fucking mission is weird.” Sakura steps over to run a hand down Sasuke’s side, checking for breaks.

“Get off me. I’m fine.”

Sakura politely lowers her voice to barely audible, so Naruto, all the way across the barrier bubble, telling Sai to “_Drop it, for Medic’s sake,”_ doesn’t overhear. “Yeah, and if Naruto takes another, closer look at your fucked up chakra pathways, are they gonna realize how much you pulled from seal storage to keep going so far?”

Sasuke stops trying to get away.

“Mhm!” Sakura hums, pleasantly.

No breaks, quite a lot of bruises, two torn ligaments, one sprained wrist surrounded by burns, too many new little scars among his old ones. Sakura maneuvers some light healing around his sealing tattoos carefully.

“Fucker,” Sasuke mumbles back.

“Not right now, Sasuke,” She pats his cheek and then dances away before he can get Kusanagi up, “You’re not in best fucking form.”

“Ugh!” He swipes the blades after her, anyways.

The barrier field goes down. Sai goes up onto Yamato’s back. Naruto is biting their nails, watching.

She goes to them.

“Focus, Naru,” Sakura says, gently. “We have to figure out how to send the yokai home.”

Home. The word lingers dry on her tongue.

“I shouldn’t have said we had to save them.” Naruto’s eyes are a contrast, far too wet.

“You _didn’t_ say that,” Sakura hands Sasuke two of his kunai she found amongst the rubble. He hands her a bandage and a blood-replacement pill, eyes flicking down to her calf, where she’s trailing blood in the mud.

“Shit,” she mutters. “Didn’t even notice that one.”

Even now, the pain doesn’t register. It’s not more than a slice. No cute tendons or ligaments. Could have happened at any time.

She cleans it, wraps it hard, and pops the pill. She stands back up to find Naruto biting their nails again, looking at the yokai this time. Eyes red rimmed with self-flagellation.

“Stop it,” Sasuke pulls their hand down from their mouth and holds onto their wrist.

“Wanting to save people is good,” Sakura says, firm as the palm she presses to Naruto’s back.

“And death is always the easy way,” Yamato says, coming up beside them. Sai draped securely across her back. Sakura checks their chakra subtly. Finds the same reverb that’s lingering in nice little shocks across her arm, all across the center of Sai’s chakra system. Their breathing is shallow within their newly regrown ribs. She covers up her wince by turning Naruto to face her.

“Hey,” she says, eyes catching Naruto’s. “We can send them home, okay. Final rest. You know how to trace a yokai’s origin”

Through their chakra’s scent, Sakura thinks, remembers Kurama blathering something about it while drunk when they were all 17.

“That’s the problem,” Naruto shakes their head. Sakura catches them adjusting their hand in Sasuke’s, twining their fingers together, “My tsui kiba jutsu doesn’t work. There’s no scent trace. Nothing to follow. Kurama tried, too. Traits don’t even match a family, size doesn’t align with the chakra output.” Naruto glances over at the body again, finishing at a whisper, “Doesn’t make sense.”

“Hm,” Sakura thinks back to the chakra diffusion rate, “What would you say, if I asked you how you knew it was a yokai?”

Naruto turns to face her, smiles a bit indulgently, “Well, its not like it could be anything else, Saku.”

“Can’t it, though?”

They all turn towards Sai.

Naruto’s pretty face is folding into a frown. “What do you two mean?”

“They mean,” Yamato adjusts her hold on Sai, “That nothing we witnessed just now is in any of our scrolls for yokai attributes and behaviors, Naruto. Even the ones you wrote with B and the Kazekage.”

“But,” Naruto’s hand comes up to press at their lips. Sakura pulls it down, holds onto it, so they’re tied between Sasuke and her. “No, I don’t. That doesn’t.” The purple in their eyes bleeds to red. Their head tilts, listening.

They wait out the convo, familiar with this halting jinchuuriki tempo.

“Nice to see Tea again, though,” Sakura says, pleasantly, swinging Naruto’s arm between them. Great sunsets.”

Sasuke huffs.

“Oh really beautiful, yeah,” Yamato agrees. “Especially covered in bloody mud and a carcass.”

“You’re no fun, senpai,” Sakura grins at her.

“Yeah, Kakashi’s the fun one,” Yamato says, straight faced.

“Ha!”

“Mm,” Naruto starts. Sakura turns towards them, dropping her laughter in the dirt.

“What did the Kyuubi say?” Yamato asks.

Naruto bites at their lip, “Said they’d ask around, but that. The chakra itself,” their hand clenches, tries to pull away from Sakura’s grip. She squeezes their fingers. Naruto squeezes back and sighs, “Kurama says it would make sense. As not-a-yokai’s.”

Sasuke narrows his bloodshot eyes at Naruto’s tip-toeing words, “What does the fox actually think it _is_?”

Naruto shakes their head.

“Naruto,” Yamato’s captain voice.

Stubbornness molds a jutting line out of Naruto’s jaw, “No. We have to check with the other jinchuuriki first.”

_If only the nations knew how very _not_ separated the jinchuuriki actually are,_ Sakura thinks, grinning with too much teeth, _how very _not_ happy they would be._

She’s not bothered, though. None of them really are. Keeping Naruto’s secrets is part of what they’re all made to do.

“Fine,” Yamato sighs loudly, like _isn’t it a shame I’m stuck with this team I chose to stay with_. “For now we seal it. We’ll figure it out later. We have to be clear of the border in under 90 minutes to avoid a check-in.”

“Ugh,” Sasuke pulls his hand away and starts settling his armor and pack for running. He pulls out a standard large sealing scroll and passes it to Naruto.

Sakura lets go of Naruto, too. Glances at Sai with a pointed eyebrow. They smile at her, small and real.

“Over in the treeline.”

She gives them a thumbs up, toddles over the messy ground, to find their pack slung on a low branch. She backtracks to the team, swinging it securely over her dirt-caked shoulder.

As they all finish packing, Naruto speaks quietly. “It’s just,” they swallow hard, still looking at the body, “Are we _sure_?”

“Sai?” Yamato asks, shifting them higher on her shoulder.

“Mm,” Sai mumbles against Yamato’s shoulder, cheek pudged up all perfect – if just not for the purple bruise slapped across it. “Creature showed only minimally recognizable yokai attributes. Instead; displayed base animalistic intelligence, hypoalgesia, chakra structure with foreign compound introductions and mass tissue grafting. Given additional corporal maintenance of its corpse –”

“Corporeality,” Sakura rolls her eyes.

“84% chance faulty identification as yokai, class 3C,” Sai finishes, with a swollen smile back at them, voice firm enough even Naruto exhales in resolution.

“Okay,” they whisper.

84 is pretty good when nothing in their lives is 100%.

Sakura oils the edge of her wakizashi before sliding it back inside its sheath. “So, a human’s got their hands on how to fuck with chakra systems of animals to try and breed fake yokai.” Makes her feel somewhat better, honestly. And simultaneously worse, because this is such a pile of shit to carry home and have to sort through. _Are there more? No –_ “Then probably channeled too much chakra and lost themselves in the reaction.”

Gods, she’s right back to being tired.

“Sakura,” Naruto hisses, eyes tinged red, “We didn’t say _that_.”

“Didn’t have to,” Sasuke kicks at their ankles.

“Hey!”

“And,” Sai continues over the sound of their teammates devolving into school children, “we couldn’t contain just one of them.”

Sakura feels like shoving in with _‘Well we can kill one just fine,’ _wouldn’t be in the spirit, but. “We didn’t know what it was. We‘re too used to dealing with yokai-kind.”

“Probably,” Yamato agrees, flat and serious. “Wouldn’t have happened to another team.”

Naruto’s face twists, pain arcing heavy across the set of their shoulders. They leave off trying to pummel Sasuke’s biceps with too-weak punches, to look back over at the corpse, eyes dropping down after a second, to glare at their own hands.

Sakura and Sasuke glare over at Yamato. She stares back at them, dead eyed and forthright.

“You’re the leader,” Sakura says eventually, voice cold.

“Don’t be nasty,” her senpai says back, “You don’t want my job. Do your own. Take the body back in seal. Henge over the site.” Yamato does a quick snake seal. Her pack lifts into Naruto’s arms. “Next team member on assignment out of Konoha takes the body to one of Naruto’s people. Maybe they know what rites to perform, at least.”

Yamato’s right, of course, which is infuriating.

“Naruto,” Yamato continues softer, catching their eyes as they finally turn away from the corpse, “We couldn’t have known. We all did our best and that’s it. Mission complete.”

Naruto swallows.

“Repeat it,” Yamato says, voice so pleasant it’s dangerous.

“What?” Naruto asks, mulish.

“Uzumaki.”

“Fine,” Naruto kicks at the ground, “We did our best. Couldn’t have known. Mission complete.”

Sakura covers a bitter smile by wiping at the mud on her face.

“Well,” Yamato says, after a moment, “Almost complete. Sakura?”

“Hai,” she head over to the corpse. “Sasuke, help me weave a kawarimi, so we can take the body with us and report we shoved it into the sea to honor the yokai gods.”

“Gods,” Sasuke sighs, “The council is so fucking stupid they’ll believe it.”

Sakura laughs, “Naru, chakra to us, please.”

Naruto doesn’t laugh, but their hand is steady on Sakura’s forearm, chakra firm as ever. It presses warm against her Team 7 seal, offering everything she needs. Sasuke mumbles instructions on which genjutsu to tie to the kawarimi. With both of their help, Sakura henges the pile of calcified tree trunks into a neat replica of the not-yokai. Then, Sakura searches deep for some trace of the yellow chakra, finds it still sinking down into the earth, highly dissipated. She nudges Naruto’s shoulder.

“Chakra’s 12 meters down, at the watershed, spread about 50 meters wide.”

“Mm,” Naruto closes their eyes and reaches down beside Sakura. “It’s nearly gone.”

“Fast,” Sakura agrees.

Sasukes slaps a storage seal on the henge’s body and then tears at the edge of it, wearing away at its stability.

Sakura and Naruto gather thin threads of the chakra with a combination net, shoving them into the henge’s seal. It’s trying work; Sakura’s breathing heavy by the end of it.

“That’s good,” Sasuke says, 4 minutes later. “Seal should disintegrate in 2 days or so.”

“Great,” Sakura mumbles, pushing her arms up over her head to pop her shoulders.

Naruto’s got the sealing scroll Sasuke passed them earlier in their hands. Turning it over and over. After a minute, Sasuke looks ready to tug the scroll out of Naruto’s hands and bop them over head with it.

“Alright,” Naruto says eventually and flits forward to seal the corpse almost faster than Sakura can follow. They’re back, scroll shoved somewhere in their armor, before she can even finish getting to her feet. Sasuke doesn’t say anything, but the set of his shoulders loses some tension.

“Show-off,” Sakura says, to make Naruto smile.

“It comes natural to me,” Naruto says back, nose squished up happily.

_So do most things_, Sakura thinks, _you just got taught to expect they wouldn’t._

She kisses them, to say it, instead, hands cupped around their soft cheeks to pull them in. They kiss back, lips careful, dry and dusty from battle. Achingly familiar to Sakura. She pecks them one last time and pulls back.

Naruto’s eyes are soft, watching her. Then, they flick over her shoulder and harden back up. “We should finish up.”

“Yep,” she agrees, glancing behind her, too.

Sasuke’s already back with Yamato and Sai, nearly at the tree line. Soft as the sun, she can hear them talking quietly about their route across the isthmus back to Fire County. She signals East to Sasuke, as she and Naruto set about launching the henge into the ocean. He waves her off.

“Launch?” Sakura asks, turning back to the henge and Naruto.

They nod.

“3, 2, 1 –”

Sakura punches out a 5 meter column of rock to send the kawarimi over the cliffside, tentacles waving like some morbid octopus doll thrown out a window by an unhappy child.

Naruto catches the arc of the henge, sweeps it neatly out to sea, with a massive whirlpool of wind. It plonks into the water a couple of hundred meters out with a satisfying, snout disappearing underwater last, teeth bared, cheery as a sewn smile.

_Not so different from a human at all_, Sakura thinks, staring at it until the last bubbles have faded.

“C’mon,” Naruto mumbles beside her, looking away from the water, “Let’s go.”

“Yeah,” she says, quietly, “Let’s,” and takes their hand.

**Author's Note:**

> this draft is currently at 33k and still has 2-3 chapters to go.  
next update sometime soon! catch me meanwhile on [tumblr](http://transnin.tumblr.com/). comments and critiques always greatly appreciated! <3


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